My name is Meg Daniels, and I was living a conventional life in New York City until I met Andy Beck, Private Investigator, who thought I killed my boss. I didn’t. I did, however, hit it off with Andy. We’ve been together for about seven years now, engaged for one. I can no longer describe my life as conventional. It’s more fun.
After a few years working in the Bahamas, Andy and I are back at the Jersey Shore housesitting a fabulous oceanfront home while Andy takes some classes and we try to work out our next move. In the meantime, he does a little PI work and I help him out. That’s how I found myself helping—read that working for free— undercover at the reunion of a group from a 1969 summer house. Well, not exactly undercover. I really am a young friend who came to help with the reunion but with an ulterior motive. My real job? Snoop to find out if any of the guests had information about the fate of a stranger who came to town in 1969, that town being Sea Isle City, New Jersey. I know. I asked the same thing. Why couldn’t the hostess, Andy’s classmate Grace, ask those questions? I don’t buy her story that eliciting information about the stranger is just a whim, a lark. There has to be more to this caper. And, from what I’ve seen so far, boy is there.
So, here I am in Sea Isle City. I’ve traded my busy daily routine which starts around 10am (most of it scheduled on the couch with a book, a phone, or a remote control) for life as a gofer. Up with the sun, something I hate, to set up breakfast, run errands, and, worst of all, transport chairs and umbrellas to the beach. Then I repeat the process but in reverse until dinner.
At least my efforts are paying off. Among the five guests, everyone remembers the guy. conveniently named Guy. Several are convinced he was the perpetrator of an unsolved murder on the Garden State Parkway on Memorial Day weekend which many still believe was an early Ted Bundy crime. One guest even thinks Guy was Ted Bundy. I have a feeling, however, that is not how things are going to turn out.
In the meantime, I am eavesdropping on their stories, listening to their music, and thinking about their past and not my future. Well, my distant future. I am thinking about the day I return to that couch to do nothing much. How long will that last? I don’t know. I’ve gotten a reputation for solving old puzzles. It probably won’t be long before some person with a problem shows up on my doorstep.
LAST-SEEN-IN-SEA-ISLE
Series: A Meg Daniels Mystery, Book 7
Genre: Traditional Mystery
Release: May 2026
Format: Print, Digital
Amazon | Barnes & Noble
Meg Daniels should know by now that wherever she goes, mystery follows. Her fiancé is taking classes at Stockton University and has befriended Grace Grant, a fellow later-in-life student. Under false pretenses, Grace asks Meg to visit her lavish beachfront house in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, on the same weekend she’s hosting a reunion of pals from the summer of 1969.
Meg discovers that Grace is hoping she’ll track down Guy-last name unknown-who disappeared from Grace’s life on the day of the moon landing. Without much to go on, Meg looks into Guy’s whereabouts, but something doesn’t feel right about her new case. The reunion guests treat her like a servant. Someone seems to be following her. She’s convinced that one of Grace’s neighbors is hiding a dark secret. And it’s obvious that Grace is leaving out important details from her past.
Is Guy the infamous Garden State Parkway killer, as some of Grace’s friends believe? This cold case turns into a race against the clock when Meg discovers that finding would-be murderer Guy could be the key to saving a life.
About the author
Jane Kelly is the author of the Meg Daniels Mysteries, Meg Daniels Mystery Weekenders, Writing in Time Mysteries and Widow Lady Mysteries. Her stand-alone novels include Nightingale Songs, A Death in Scilly, and The Secret Audience. She holds an MS in Information Studies from Drexel University and an MPhil in Popular Literature from Trinity College, University of Dublin. She is a past-president of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime and has served on the board of the New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. The fourth and sixth books in the Meg Daniels series, Missing You in Atlantic City, and Strangers in the Avalon Dunes, won Independent Publisher Book Award silver medals for mid-Atlantic fiction. She currently lives in the Philadelphia area.