Jim Kelly is an author and journalist. Kelly won the Crime Writers Association Dagger in the Library award in 2006. As of 2011, Kelly has written nine crime novels, including the award-winning The Water Clock, featuring fictional journalist Philip Dryden, based in the Cambridgeshire area of Great Britain. In 2010 Kelly won the New Angle prize for literature for Death Watch, the second in the Shaw and Valentine series.

1. The Water Clock [2002] 
In the bleak snowbound landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens, a car is winched from a frozen river. Inside, locked in a block of ice, is a man’s mutilated body. Later, high on Ely Cathedral, a second body is found, grotesquely riding a stone gargoyle. The decaying corpse has been there more than thirty years. When forensic evidence links both victims to one awful event in 1966, local reporter Philip Dryden knows he’s onto a great story. But as his investigations uncover some disturbing truths they also point towards one terrifying foggy night in the Fens two years ago. A night that changed Dryden’s life for ever ....

2. The Fire Baby [2004] 
Summer, 1976. A plane crashes on a farm in the Cambridgeshire fens. Out of the flames walks young Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms. Twenty-seven years later, investigative journalist Philip Dryden - visiting his wife, Laura, in hospital - is witness to Maggie's deathbed confession. But some secrets are best kept secret, and what started out for Dryden as a small and curious story about the only survivor of an almost-forgotten plane crash soon escalates into a full-blown murder investigation. And while Dryden is wondering what other secrets Maggie carried, his semi-conscious wife is trying to tell him something that might just save his life...

3. The Moon Tunnel [2005] 
In the past: a man crawls desperately through a claustrophobic escape tunnel beneath a POW camp in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Above, a shadow passes across the moon, while ahead only death awaits him. In the present: Philip Dryden is reporting on an archaeological dig at the old POW camp when a body is uncovered. But there is something odd: the man appears to have been shot in the head, and the position indicates that he was trying to get into the camp, not escape it. It's a puzzle which excites Dryden far more than the archaeologists or the police. That is, until a second, more recent, body is discovered...

4. The Coldest Blood [2006] 
A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon he'll be dead - and life can begin again. Three decades later Declan McIlroy, a 39-year-old loner, is found frozen to death in his flat as Arctic temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely. His is not the only cold death that winter, but nevertheless reporter Philip Dryden has worrying doubts - for it seems Declan may not have been alone as he slowly froze to death . . . Dryden's suspicions harden when days later he finds the body of Declan's best friend Joe - frozen within a shell of ice on the doorstep of his secluded Fenland farmhouse. Soon Dryden is picking his way along a disturbing trail of cruelty and betrayal to a brilliantly executed crime. And to a chilling, half-remembered mystery from his own childhood . . .

5. The Skeleton Man [2007] 
For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Government for military training. In its thousand-year-old history, it had been famous for one thing - never having recorded a single crime. But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blown apart. For the TA's shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck ... Two days later, a man is pulled from the reeds in the river near Ely - he has no idea who he is or how he got there. But, he knows the words 'Jude's Ferry' are important, and he knows he is afraid...

6. Nightrise [2012] 
Journalist Philip Dryden is shocked to be informed by police that his father has been killed in a car accident - he drowned during the fenland floods of 1977, 35 years before. At the same time, two unrelated cases are demanding Dryden's professional attention: a body riddled with bullets found hanging in the middle of a lettuce field, and a couple protesting that the local council has buried their baby daughter in a pauper's grave without permission. As Dryden pieces the clues together, he realizes that the three cases may be related after all....

7. The Funeral Owl [2013]
When a reader contacts local newspaper The Crow to report a rare sighting of the Boreal or so-called 'Funeral' owl, the paper's editor Philip Dryden has a sense of foreboding. For the Funeral Owl is said to be an omen of death.

It's already proving to be one of the most eventful weeks in The Crow's history. The body of a Chinese man has been discovered hanging from a cross in a churchyard in Brimstone Hill in the West Fens. The inquest into the deaths of two tramps found in a flooded ditch has unearthed some shocking findings. A series of metal thefts is plaguing the area. And PC Stokely Powell has requested Dryden's help in solving a ten-year-old cold case: a series of violent art thefts culminating in a horrifying murder.

As Dryden investigates, he uncovers some curious links between the seemingly unrelated cases: it would appear the sighting of the Funeral Owl is proving prophetic in more ways than one.