Works by
Jim Kelly
(Writer)

Phillip Dryden Series
Journalist

1. The Water Clock (2003, UK, US)
   In the bleak, snowbound landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens, a man's mutilated body is discovered in a block of ice. High up on Ely Cathedral a second body is discovered, grotesquely riding an ancient stone gargoyle. The decaying corpse, it seems, has been there for more than thirty years.
   
   Philip Dryden, lead reporter for the local newspaper The Crow, knows he's onto a great story when forensic evidence links both victims to one terrifying crime in 1966. But the story also offers Dryden the key to a very personal mystery. Who saved his life after a car crash one foggy night two years ago---and who left his wife, Laura, in a ditch to die? As he continues his painful visits to Laura, who has been locked in a coma ever since the accident, Dryden's search for the truth takes on ever increasing urgency. The answers will bring him face to face with his own guilt, his own fears---and a cold and ruthless killer.
   
   This brilliant and evocative murder mystery, which was shortlisted for Britain's John Creasey Award for the best first crime novel of the year, marks Jim Kelly as the new master of suspense.

2. The Fire Baby (2004, UK, US
   In the stifling heat wave of June 1976, an American plane crashes on the Cambridgeshire Fens, the point of impact the remote Black Bank Farm. Out of the flames walks a young woman, Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms.
   
   Twenty-seven years later, Maggie is dying. Journalist Philip Dryden knows this because Maggie is lying in the hospital ward next to his wife Laura.
   
   As Maggie prepares to leave this world, Laura---locked in a coma for four years---appears to be slowly returning to it. And for the last few days, she has listened to Maggie's death-bed confession surrounding events on the night of the crash all those years ago.
   
   It's a confession that will blow open the murder story that Dryden is covering. But can Laura somehow communicate to her husband the shocking secrets she has learned?

3. The Moon Tunnel (2005, UK, US)
   Crawling on elbows and knees, a man slowly inches forward, making his way through a cramped space and suffocating darkness. He doesn’t know that someone is watching, and in a flash of light, his journey is over.
   
   Now, fifty years later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is on-site at a former World War II POW camp observing an archeological dig. The archeologists are looking for buried Anglo-Saxon treasure, but the excavators have found something even more interesting---the skeletal remains of a man trapped in an underground tunnel. The dead man’s intent seems obvious, but there are two things no one can explain: The bullet hole in his forehead and the direction of the body. This prisoner was crawling in, not out.
   
   It’s a puzzle that intrigues Dryden far more than it does the archeologists or the police. Meanwhile, he continues his nightly visits to the hospital where his wife, Laura, is emerging from five years in a coma. Laura can sometimes communicate through a computer now, though the process is painfully slow and erratic. When it turns out that Laura’s father was involved with the POWs during the war, Dryden begins to wonder if the key may lie in long-buried family secrets. And then a second, more recent, body is discovered….

4. The Coldest Blood (2006, UK, US)
   A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling screams, he draws a knife across his arm. Soon he'll be dead -- and life can begin again.
   
   Three decades later Declan McIlroy is found frozen to death as Arctic temperatures grip the city of Ely. Though it is not the only cold death that winter, reporter Philip Dryden has worrying doubts -- for Declan was not alone when he died. And Dryden�s suspicions harden when days later he finds the frozen body of Declan's best friend.
   
   Soon Dryden is on the disturbing trail of a brilliantly executed crime -- and a mystery from his own childhood . .

5. The Skeleton Man (2007, UK, US)
   For seventeen years, the English hamlet of Jude’s Ferry has lain abandoned, used only for army training exercises. Before then, the isolated, thousand-year-old community was famous for one thing---having never recorded a single crime. But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the army on practice maneuvers in the empty village, its spotless reputation is literally blown apart. Artillery fire reveals a hidden cellar beneath the old pub, and inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck. No one knows---or will say---who the victim was.
   
   Two days later, a terrified man is pulled from the reeds of a nearby river, with no idea of who he is or how he got there. The only name he can remember is “Jude’s Ferry.”
   
   As Dryden searches for the secret history of the dead town, he is also witnessing a kind of rebirth: Seven years after the accident that nearly killed her, his wife, Laura, is finally emerging from coma and paralysis to begin a semblance of normal life. But will that semblance be enough for her---or for Dryden?

6. Death Wore White (2008 release)