Jim Kelly – författare

Cambridge, 1940. Snow is falling thick and fast on a cold winter's night. As a college porter makes his nightly rounds, he is startled to hear a boy's desperate screams for help coming from the icy river below. But by dawn the river has claimed its victim.When the following night an Irish Republican slogan is left at the scene of a factory explosion, Detective Inspector Eden Brooke questions whether there could be a connection between the two events. As more riddles come to light, he begins to close in on a killer, but there is one last twist: it seems that the boy had his own startling secret.

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 on to 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 forever.

As mid-winter temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely, a man is found frozen to death in his high-rise flat. The police may think that Declan McIlroy killed himself, but journalist Philip Dryden is not convinced, and he begins digging for the truth.All too soon, there's another frozen corpse to consider - that of Declan's best friend. And suddenly a routine suicide gives way to a chilling trail of cruelty and betrayal stretching back thirty years, towards a mystery from Dryden's own childhood.

The Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry is a lonely, forgotten spot. Requisitioned decades earlier by the Ministry of Defence for military training, one of its few claims to fame is that in its entire thousand-year history, it never recorded a single crime. But when a Territorial Army exercise is held amongst the ruins, a skeleton is found hanging in a bricked-up cellar, a noose round the neck. It seems that the ghostly village may hide many secrets and local newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is soon on the case.Then a man, pulled unconscious from the river at nearby Ely, claims to have lost his memory, yet reacts with startled fear to the name Jude's Ferry ...

Autumn, 1941. The third year of war and still the siren sounds, driving the people of Cambridge from their beds to trudge to one of the city's crowded bomb shelters. At dawn, the body of a young man is found in a shadowy corner. Everything points to suicide, but Detective Inspector Eden Brooke has his doubts given the unidentified man has a suspiciously tropical suntan and the detective's office telephone number scrawled on the back of his hand. Did the victim know his life was in danger?Brooke's caseload doubles when a local factory making submarine periscopes discovers it has a saboteur on the workforce. The city's police are at full-stretch. Then two more men are found dead in the city's shelters. A blackout killer is on the loose. The trail leads Brooke to the university, a laboratory which hides a brutal secret, and the key to a startling mystery.

Autumn 1941. As the war continues and Cambridge endures nightly air raids, its bomb shelters are packed with those driven by the sound of the siren. At dawn, a young man is found dead in a shadowy corner, apparently a suicide, yet Detective Inspector Eden Brooke suspects otherwise: the stranger bears a tropical tan and Brooke's office number on his hand.With police stretched thin over a case of sabotage at a factory making periscopes, fear grips the city. Brooke follows a dark trail to the university, where a laboratory conceals a brutal secret and the key to a wartime killer's deadly game.

October, 1942. Thousands of American GIs are stationed across eastern England building airfields to bomb Nazi Germany and Cambridge's dance halls and pubs are a hot spot for Yanks on leave. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke is called to the aerodrome east of the city when the remains of an airman, identified by his dog tag, are uncovered by workers extending the runway. However, this is no recent burial.A fresh murder means that a black US serviceman faces the hangman's noose, but Brooke sees through the clouds of tension and prejudice and believes he sees an innocent man.

October, 1942. Thousands of American GIs are stationed across eastern England building airfields to bomb Nazi Germany and Cambridge's dance halls and pubs are a hot spot for Yanks on leave. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke is called to the aerodrome east of the city when the remains of an airman, identified by his dog tag, are uncovered by workers extending the runway. However, this is no recent burial.A fresh murder means that a black US serviceman faces the hangman's noose, but Brooke sees through the clouds of tension and prejudice and believes he sees an innocent man.

On the football field NFL great Jim Kelly was a strong-armed passer, leading his team to victory after victory. In THE PLAYBOOK FOR DADS he passes principles instead of footballs, still using his talent to lead men but now he leads them to greatness as fathers, in his view the world's most important job.With an emphasis on preparation, hard work and perseverance, Kelly tackles such essential issues as respect, character, accountability and spiritual discipline. From commitment and courage to honesty and humility, Kelly's lessons-learned on and off the field- guide men striving to be the fathers God designed them to be ­- so their children can grow to be everything they are meant to be. Conversational and refreshingly honest, Jim challenges fathers to work hard, pray for their children often, love their wives and implement these principles. Both practical and inspirational this is Jim Kelly coaching every dad how to be the star quarterback for the home team-his family

This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is set up by an old uncle to think he's going to be scalped. Seeing demons in every shadow a few nights later, he's told by an older cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem to want kids to go through the same bad things they did. Just how they are. Shut up, he's advised. Get used to it. Hunkered in the dark listening. In the next room, bubbling a bottle with a drinking buddy, his Old Man telling tales of roadhouse glory. Bad odds fist fights, rearranged faces that stay that way. For weeks he wakes afraid to touch his face. Will his nose, ears and eyes have shifted places while he slept, his face forever scrambled, rearranged?Riots and war. Conscription. The fights, the violence no longer just yarns heard late at night. Drafted at eighteen, he has to decide, will he go halfway round the world to kill people he has no earthly quarrel with? Considers conscientious objection. His girlfriend bluntly asks him when he became a pacifist. You can't, she suggests, the minute you get drafted, suddenly announce yourself as some kind of Instant Gandhi. Not, anyway, and expect a Draft Board made up of World War II vets to buy it.Teaching in a tiny mountain town. Some kids, he's told early on, are just too dumb to bother with. Signing on for a salesman's pay. Hit your quota or hit the road. Logic of a kiss, that sprung free promise of what life can be, the one constant throughout. A better way glimpsed, lost and found, here and gone. Pitchman's blues.

This short story collection offers snapshots of a life. A kid is set up by an old uncle to think he’s going to be scalped. Seeing demons in every shadow a few nights later, he’s told by an older cousin it was all a joke, that adults always seem to want kids to go through the same bad things they did. Just how they are. Shut up, he’s advised. Get used to it. Hunkered in the dark listening. In the next room, bubbling a bottle with a drinking buddy, his Old Man telling tales of roadhouse glory. Bad odds fist fights, rearranged faces that stay that way. For weeks he wakes afraid to touch his face. Will his nose, ears and eyes have shifted places while he slept, his face forever scrambled, rearranged? Riots and war. Conscription. The fights, the violence no longer just yarns heard late at night. Drafted at eighteen, he has to decide, will he go halfway round the world to kill people he has no earthly quarrel with? Considers conscientious objection. His girlfriend bluntly asks him when he became a pacifist. You can’t, she suggests, the minute you get drafted, suddenly announce yourself as some kind of Instant Gandhi. Not, anyway, and expect a Draft Board made up of World War II vets to buy it. Teaching in a tiny mountain town. Some kids, he’s told early on, are just too dumb to bother with. Signing on for a salesman’s pay. Hit your quota or hit the road. Logic of a kiss, that sprung free promise of what life can be, the one constant throughout. A better way glimpsed, lost and found, here and gone. Pitchman’s blues.

1939, Cambridge. The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout - The Great Darkness - covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam. The night is full of alarms, but in this Phoney War, the enemy never comes.But daylight reveals a corpse on the riverside, the body torn apart by some unspeakable force. Brooke investigates, calling on the expertise and inspiration of a faithful group of fellow 'nighthawks' across the city, all condemned, like him, to a life lived away from the light. Within hours The Great Darkness has claimed a second victim. War, it seems, has many victims. But what links these crimes of the night?

A lone German bomber crosses the east coast of Britain on a moonless night in the long, hot summer of 1940. The pilot picks up the silver thread of a river and, following it to his target, drops his bomb over Cambridge's rail yards. The shell falls short of its mark and lands in a neighbourhood of terraced streets on the edge of the city's medieval centre.DI Eden Brooke is first on the scene and discovers the body of an elderly woman, Nora Wylde, in a house on Elm Street, two fingers on her left hand severed, in what looks like a brutal attempt by looters to steal her rings.When the next day Nora's teenage granddaughter Peggy, a munitions worker, is reported missing, Brooke realises there is more to the situation than meets the eye.

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.

From beneath a wartime POW camp near Ely, deep in the Cambridgeshire Fens, a man crawls through an escape tunnel. But he won't emerge until fifty years of peace have passed.When he does, unearthed by archaeologists seeking a Saxon burial tomb, local journalist Philip Dryden knows he has a mystery to solve. First the man appears to have been shot in the head - and second, he was breaking into the camp not out.The police treat the body as an historical curiosity, but Dryden digs deeper - and soon unearths a corpse of much more recent origin.