Here’s a quick look at the titles in the series if you want to start at the beginning:

Killing Time in Ocean City (#1)

Meg Daniels discovers that her former boss has turned up dead near her rented beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey. A series of suspicious circumstances turn Meg into a prime suspect in his murder.

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Cape Mayhem (#2)

Meg Daniels arrives in Cape May, New Jersey, for what should have been a romantic off-season weekend for two. Though unattached at the moment, Meg’s courtship with trouble has been in high gear lately, and her holiday soon promises more of the same when it seems that overnight, a guest at the Parsonage Bed & Breakfast has undergone an impossible transformation.

Wrong Beach Island (#3)

Meg Daniels never had the displeasure of meeting Dallas Spenser, but when the body of the prosperous Brit washes up on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, with a bullet in his back, it immediately derails her romantic vacation plans. She had hoped to be sailing the Caribbean by now, but Spenser’s murder presents some serious obstacles.

Missing You in Atlantic City (#4)

Meg Daniels is doing her best to sleep late, limit her exercise, and get plenty of sand between her toes during her Atlantic City vacation—until a lounge singer who channels Frank Sinatra asks her to solve a decades-old mystery: He was just an infant in 1964 when the Democratic Convention came to town and his mother vanished without a trace.

Greetings From Ventnor City (#5)

A woman recognizes Meg Daniels as the amateur sleuth who recently solved a mysterious disappearance from the 1960s, and she asks for help in learning the fate of the sister she last knew as a 19-year-old who ran away from her Ventnor, New Jersey, home in 1968. 

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Strangers in the Avalon Dunes (#6)

Meg Daniels settles into a lazy routine in an upscale home in the high dunes of Avalon, New Jersey, that is owned by a friend who has asked her to housesit for several months. However, Meg finds she can’t outrun her reputation. When a young woman asks Meg to find her long-lost grandfather who went missing in 1977, Meg just can’t say no.

Last Seen in Sea Isle (#7)

Meg Daniels’ fiancé is taking classes at Stockton University and has befriended Grace Grant, a fellow later-in-life student. Under false pretenses, Grace invites Meg to visit her lavish beachfront house in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, where she asks her to track down Guy—last name unknown—who disappeared from Grace’s life on the day of the moon landing in 1969. 

You can also read a bonus mystery, A Fear of Seaside Heights.

When Meg Daniels agrees to scoop ice cream at a Seaside Heights, New Jersey, boardwalk stand, she doesn’t know that what seems like an easy job will turn into a dangerous mission.

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Jane Kelly began vacationing at the Jersey Shore at the age of 5 months and has returned every year since. A graduate of Chestnut Hill College, she has an M.S. in information studies from Drexel University and an M.Phil. in Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Two of her Meg Daniels mysteries, Missing You in Atlantic City and Strangers in the Avalon Dunes, won Independent Publisher Book Award silver medals for mid-Atlantic fiction. Jane currently lives in the Philadelphia area.

Read on for NewsBreaks’ interview with Jane.

This is your seventh Meg Daniels Mystery with Plexus Publishing, Inc. Each is set in a different town along the Jersey Shore. How did you come up with the idea for the very first book? Did you always envision writing a series featuring Meg? How do you decide which town to focus on next?

Years ago, before people had computers at home, I visited a friend and saw that she had bought a—and this will give you an idea how long ago it was—word processor. I asked why. She said she was going to write mysteries, and she had her first victim. A mean girl from our class. I thought that was a great idea, so when I ran into a boss that I wanted to kill, I did. On paper.

I knew Information Today, Inc./Plexus Publishing, Inc. president and CEO Tom Hogan from my day job, and we talked about the need for more books set at the Jersey Shore. We put the two ideas together. We decided that a body couldn’t wash up onshore every week or so in the same town, so we moved the stories up and down the coast. I started in Ocean City because I had been there so often during the first 20 years of my life. It took me a while to get to Sea Isle, even though I had spent several summers there as a young adult. It was a harder book to write because it was more personal. More often, I am writing about people who are older than I am.

Why did you make Meg’s romantic partner Andy a professional private investigator, and Meg his amateur assistant? Did you ever consider making Meg the professional, or did you always like the idea of her being a little out of her depth in solving mysteries?

Yes, I did like her being a bit of a fish out of water. I wanted her to be an amateur sleuth because I wanted the books to be beach reads, cozy mysteries. Small-town setting. Limited cast of characters, i.e., suspects. No on-screen sex or violence. I like to think of them as polite mysteries. Traditional mysteries with a puzzle for the reader to solve. I brought Andy in so he could introduce her to the world of investigations, but I repeatedly send him away to work, travel, or go to school. I want the book to be hers.

I always sort of miss Andy in the books when he’s busy with something else, but I do enjoy Meg’s other (amateur) sidekicks, like rock star Xander Frost from Greetings From Ventnor City. How do you decide with whom she should pair up in any given book? 

I want Meg to be the heroine, and if Andy, the professional private investigator, were around, that might not be the case. I have started giving her a sidekick of some sort for a couple of reasons: Readers like Meg’s wry observations. Sidekicks give her someone to play off. They can also be somewhat annoying. The way she deals with them helps to reveal her personality. They also play a role in revealing the plot. Meg can tell them her theories, and they can throw out their own ideas that Meg can assess. That way, they help the story move along. 

Many of the books feature cases from decades prior that Meg is asked to solve. What’s your research process like for building out the historical flashbacks in these books? What is it about the ’60s that draws you to that time period specifically?

I love to do the research. I’ve done location research for every book, but I really enjoy the historical research. I over-research both types. The temptation is to include too much. Hours of research can boil down to one paragraph, one sentence, one word. Writing shore mysteries, I spend a lot of time checking historical weather, tides, sunrises, and moonrises. The important thing is to get every fact, every word, right, which is almost impossible because there is someone out there who will say, “I got married that day in 1964 in Atlantic City, and the rain did not start until 4:30.”

Why the 1960s? I like to write about the 1960s because it is impossible to overestimate the seismic changes that happened in the American culture starting in 1963. I always picture happy characters from 1962 posing on the beach with the ocean at their back not knowing a giant tidal wave is about to break over them. In my view, the change came to the surface starting with the first Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. People alive at the time will tell you nothing was the same after that.

When you begin planning your books, how does the mystery take shape for you? Do you plot out the ending first and work backward to plant the clues, or do you have a general idea of where the mystery is going and allow for surprises along the way?  

It varies. Sometimes I know where I want to go, and sometimes I have no idea. When I wrote Wrong Beach Island, I finished the book and realized I’d accused the wrong killer. I went back and changed it. I found that I had left clues all along. I do sometimes have the entire plot finished and then realize I need to drop a few more clues. I want the reader to be able to say, “Oh, yeah! That makes sense.”

The Jersey Shore of your books is full of shady characters and corruption, but many of the actual shore towns are wonderful places to visit, especially in the summer. What’s your travel pitch for someone who's never been to the Jersey Shore?  

The travel pitch for me is that every town is different. Some just a little different. Some very different. There is something for everyone. It’s not all about the beaches—although they are great. You don’t have to restrict yourself to one town. You can spend beach days in Avalon and ride the amusements in Wildwood at night. If you go to the beach in Sea Isle City, you can take a day to visit a winery in Cape May. And, of course, Atlantic City is unique. Even if you don’t gamble, you can enjoy the shows and special events.

I haven’t even gotten to the outdoor activities for birdwatchers, sky watchers, hikers, sailors, kayakers, etc. And the Pine Barrens are right there. If you find that rain is keeping you inside, there’s still plenty to do. Check out the shopping, the restaurants, and the activities at the libraries and historical societies. Or, if you prefer, you can spend every sunny day on the same beach with your chair in the low waves and every rainy day on your porch enjoying the ocean air. And, of course, I will complete those last two suggestions by adding reading a good book.