Jane Langton

Author Information
Jane Langton's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    33 Books (2 Series)
  • First Book:
    June 1962
  • Latest Book:
    April 2012
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Full Series List in Order

Hall Family Chronicles

1 - The Diamond in the Window (Jun-1962)
2 - The Swing in the Summerhouse (Oct-1981)
3 - The Astonishing Stereoscope (Dec-2001)
4 - The Fledgling (1980)
5 - The Fragile Flag (Feb-2002)
6 - The Time Bike (May-2000)
7 - The Mysterious Circus (May-2005)
8 - The Dragon Tree (Jun-2008)

A Homer Kelly Mystery

1 - The Transcendental Murder // The Minuteman Murder (1964)
2 - Dark Nantucket Noon (1975)
3 - The Memorial Hall Murder (1978)
4 - Natural Enemy (Feb-1982)
5 - Emily Dickinson Is Dead (May-1984)
6 - Good and Dead (Nov-1986)
7 - Murder at the Gardner (Mar-1988)
8 - The Dante Game (Mar-1991)
9 - God in Concord (Jul-1992)
10 - Divine Inspiration (Nov-1993)
11 - The Shortest Day (Nov-1995)
12 - Dead as a Dodo (Nov-1996)
13 - The Face on the Wall (Jun-1998)
14 - The Thief of Venice (Jun-1999)
15 - Murder at Monticello (Feb-2001)
16 - The Escher Twist (Jan-2002)
17 - The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg (Jun-2003)
18 - Steeplechase (Nov-2005)
19 - The Transcendental Murder (Apr-2012)

Book List in Order: 33 titles

  • The Diamond in the Window

    Hall Family Chronicles - 1

  • The Transcendental Murder // The Minuteman Murder

    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy
    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 1

    SCANDALOUS TRANSCENDENTAL LOVE LETTERS LEAD TO A SHOCKING DOUBLE MURDER. The peaceful little town of Concord, Massachusetts, is best known as the birthplace of the American Revolution and the home of the Transcendentalists--Thoreau, Emerson, and t...

  • The Boyhood of Grace Jones

  • Dark Nantucket Noon

    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy
    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 2

    MURDER AND BETRAYAL ECLIPSE AN ISLAND PARADISE It was a dark moment on Nantucket in more ways than one. A total eclipse of the sun has cast two and a half minutes of daytime into unnatural night, and when the sun reemerges, the poet Kitty Clark fi...

  • Paper Chains

  • The Memorial Hall Murder

    • / Amateur Sleuth
    • Buy Buy
    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 3

    After a bomb blast in Harvard's Memorial Hall and the discovery of a headless body, obviously belonging to unconventional and popular Professor Hamilton Dow, dauntless detective Homer Kelly, on campus at the time, takes charge of an investigation...

  • The Fledgling

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy
    Hall Family Chronicles - 4

    At last! I'm flyyyyyyyyyyying! It all started when Georgie discovered she could jump down twelve steps in two big, graceful bounds. Next, to her great delight, she found that jumping from the porch and floating as high as the rooftop was possible ...

  • The Swing in the Summerhouse

    Hall Family Chronicles - 2

    When Prince Krishna is called away, he leaves behind some strict instructions for the Hall children about one of the openings in the mysterious summerhouse: Keep Out! As Eddy and Eleanor swing through each of the other openings, they refuse to bre...

  • Natural Enemy

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 4

    Spiders, bees, everything in nature had its place, until people interfere -- then things can turn to murder. Edward Heron died, grasping for breath, with yellow jackets hovering around him. Had Edward’s asthma finally killed him -- or were there...



  • Emily Dickinson Is Dead

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 5

    The Belle of Amherst is losing her fans one by one.... The guests at the Emily Dickinson Memorial symposium are all passionately devoted to the poet Professor Peter Wiggins is eager to revitalize her image (and his own career) by exposing a verb c...

  • Hedgehog Boy

  • Good and Dead

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 6

    THE OLD WEST CHURCH HAD MORE REASONS THAN MOST TO WORRY ABOUT DECLINING MEMBERSHIP.... It isn't a loss of faith that is emptying the pews at Old West Church. It is something far more sinister-an inexplicable number of people are taking up residenc...

  • Murder at the Gardner

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 7

    TADPOLES IN THE COURTYARD POOL? A MUSTACHE PASTED ON THE VAN DYCK? A MURDER IN THE EARLY ITALIAN ROOM? After a series of seemingly harmless pranks at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the trustees call in ex-detective and Harvard lecturer ...

  • The Dante Game

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 8

    IN MAGNIFICENT, MYSTERIOUS FLORENCE, HOMER KELLY DISCOVERS A CITY AS CORRUPT AND DEADLY TODAY AS IT WAS IN DANTE'S TIME Sleuthing Harvard Professor Homer Kelly has come to Italy to teach at the struggling American School for Florentine Studies. Wh...

  • Salt

  • God in Concord

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 9

    Thoreau's Walden Pond is coveted by greedy real estate developers--and the local retirement community is dangerously close to the line of fire. Homer Kelly is trying to cope with the changes in Concord: the influx of tourists, a boom in flashy bou...

  • Divine Inspiration

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 10

    After a suspicious fire destroys the old church organ--along with the church sexton--Alan Starr has the complex job of voicing the new one. He's just begun to work when he notices that the church seems to have gained a new congregant--a baby boy who ...

  • Queen's Necklace

  • The Shortest Day

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 11

    A holiday brew spiced with medieval revelry, romantic rivalry--and a soupcon of murder Christmas in Cambridge is time for the annual Revels, a festival of dance and drama that harks back to ancient midwinter rituals and incantations to drive away ...



  • Dead as a Dodo

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 12

    What is Homer Kelly doing in England? In addition to working as a visiting lecturer at Oxford, he's playing part-time detective, trying to solve the great mysteries of life--and the death of a young priest who has left a cryptic note saying simply, "...

  • The Face on the Wall

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 13

    Life has not always been fair to Annie Swann. A bad marriage sullied her youth, but since her divorce she has made enough money illustrating children’s books to add a wing to her house. The new addition’s focal point will be a thirty-five-foot bl...

  • The Thief of Venice

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 14

    In the fourteenth Homer Kelly Mystery, blood flows into the ancient canals of Venice Leaving Concord, Massachusetts, for a six-week sabbatical in Venice, Professor Homer Kelly finds bliss at a rare-books conference while his wife, Mary, sets out t...

  • The Time Bike

    Hall Family Chronicles - 6

    The new bike isn‘t pretty...

    Not like the slick, red, twentyâ€"oneâ€"speed bike that was stolen the very night Eddy had received it as a birthday present. The bike that Prince Krishna sent is oldâ€"fashioned and has a wicker basket â€"â€...

  • Murder at Monticello

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 15

    Two Toms are in trouble, and they both must rely on Homer Kelly to restore their reputations While visiting Monticello for the bicentennial celebration of Thomas Jefferson's presidency, Homer Kelly is disturbed to discover our third president in t...

  • The Astonishing Stereoscope

    Hall Family Chronicles - 3

    When Eddy Hall receives five cards for his stereoscope, he and his sister, Eleanor, can't wait to see what exotic places they reveal maybe Stonehenge, or a centuries-old European cathedral. But instead, when they look through the stereoscope, Eddy...

  • The Escher Twist

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 16

    HOMER AND MARY KELLY GET LOST IN AN ESHER-LIKE LABYRINTH WHERE EVERY LINE, CURVE, AND ANGLE LEADS TO MURDER Leonard Sheldrake is a huge fan of the famous conceptual artist M. C. Escher. When Leonard hears that the visionary artist's work is coming...

  • The Fragile Flag

    Hall Family Chronicles - 5

    Everything depends on them....

    When Georgie Hall decides to walk from Concord, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., with a letter to the President and an old flag capable of producing magical visions, no one doubts that she h...

  • The Deserter: Murder at Gettysburg

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 17

    Jane Langton has set part of this dramatic story in the present and part during the great battle of Gettysburg. In the here-and-now, Homer and Mary Kelly try to trace the mysterious shame attached to the name of Mary's ancestor, Seth Morgan, a young ...

  • The Mysterious Circus

    Hall Family Chronicles - 7

    Life in the Halls' house in Concord is many things, but it is never boring. Even something as simple as having a family friend come for a visit can lead to the unexpected, the enchanted, the mysterious -- in this case, the most amazing, most mysterio...



  • Steeplechase

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 18

      "A lost church?" said Homer Kelly. "How could a church get itself lost? You mean it just pointed its steeple at the horizon and took off?"

    His wife sucked her pencil. "I know it sounds strange." Strange or not, Homer and Mary are soon enga...

  • Saint Francis and the Wolf

    This lovely retelling of one of the lesser known tales of Saint Francis centers on the legend of the great wolf of Gubbio, a ferocious canine who terrorized the town and was slowly reducing it to penury and starvation. In nearby Assisi, Brother Franc...

  • The Dragon Tree

    Hall Family Chronicles - 8

    One mystical tree. One dangerous neighbor.Strange and magical things continually occur at the Hall family's home at 40 Walden Street. Now there's a terrible sound throughout the town of Concord -- the buzzing of a chain saw. Only one thing is worse f...

  • The Transcendental Murder

    A Homer Kelly Mystery - 19

    This first book in the beloved series featuring New England cop/Emerson enthusiast Homer Kelly is “a delight . . . [a] most enjoyable murder mystery” (Eudora Welty).  The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of th...

Award-Winning Books by Jane Langton

Emily Dickinson Is Dead
1984 Nero Wolfe Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Jane Langton has published 33 books.

Jane Langton does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Transcendental Murder, was published in April 2012.

The first book by Jane Langton, The Diamond in the Window, was published in June 1962.

Yes. Jane Langton has 2 series.
Author Series
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