Jane Langton Books In Order

The Diamond in the Window

A very unusual house…
Eddy and Eleanor Hall have always known that their family was a bit out of the ordinary. After all, they live in one of the most remarkable houses in all of Concord. But they never guessed just how extraordinary their house really is, or what tremendous secrets about their family’s past it holds. That is, until they discover the magical attic room with its beautiful stained glass window, abandoned toys, and two perfectly made up, empty beds that seem to be waitingperhaps for two children just like themselves…
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The Swing in the Summerhouse

Keep Out!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 break the rule, even as their temptation grows. But when Oliver and little Georgie disappear through the forbidden archway, Eleanor and Eddy know that they must either break their promise or risk never seeing their friends again.

The Astonishing Stereoscope

Five mysterious cards…
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 and Eleanor see some very strange things. An odd looking rope hangs from the sky down into every picture. A marmalade colored cat that looks suspiciously like Herm, the family cat, also appears. And one picture looks like the front hall of their very own house! The images seem to be almost real, not just three dimensional illusions. All it will take is one little tug on that rope to find out for sure…
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The Fledgling

Read by Mary Beth HurtApprox. 4.5 hours 3 cassettesA Newbery Honor BookAn ALA Notable BookA Children’s Editors’ ChoiceIt all started when Georgie, hardly more than a wisp of thistledown, discovered she could jump down twelve steps in two big graceful bounds. Next, to her great delight, she learned that jumping from the porch and floating as high as the rooftop was possible too. So when the mysterious Canada goose came to her window one night it seemed only natural to climb onto his back and go off with him to learn how to really fly. Jane Langton spins a marvelous fantasy that wild delight all who dream that someday, somehow, we will magically find ourselves aloft and suddenly able to fly!

The Fragile Flag

Five mysterious cards…
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 and Eleanor see some very strange things. An odd looking rope hangs from the sky down into every picture. A marmalade colored cat that looks suspiciously like Herm, the family cat, also appears. And one picture looks like the front hall of their very own house! The images seem to be almost real, not just three dimensional illusions. All it will take is one little tug on that rope to find out for sure…
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The Time Bike

The strangest things seem to happen to the Hall family like the time Eddy and Eleanor had an adventure and found an enchanted diamond, or the summer their cousin Georgie flew with geese. Now their adventure is with time itself. It starts when Eddy receives an unusually large packing crate from his mysterious uncle, Prince Krishna, containing an old fashioned bicycle, complete with a wicker basket the kind of bike no self respecting boy like Eddy would be caught dead riding. The bike possesses more than just a basket, however: It possesses the ability to travel through time, and soon Eddy is on the ride of his life! But trips through time can have unpredictable results, and they’re not without danger…
. Newbery Honor author Jane Langton’s sixth book about the extraordinary Hall family is a magical account of the perils and surprises of travel in the fourth dimension.

The Mysterious Circus

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 mysterious circus ever.

From Uncle Krishna’s garbled phone message to the fantastic ending, the latest Hall Family Chronicle has all of the earmarks of a Jane Langton novel: fantasy, humor, and magic!

Join Eleanor, Eddie, Georgie, their new friend Andy, and his twelve very large friends more about them later in Jane Langton’s The Mysterious Circus.

The Dragon Tree

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 mysterious circus ever.

From Uncle Krishna’s garbled phone message to the fantastic ending, the latest Hall Family Chronicle has all of the earmarks of a Jane Langton novel: fantasy, humor, and magic!

Join Eleanor, Eddie, Georgie, their new friend Andy, and his twelve very large friends more about them later in Jane Langton’s The Mysterious Circus.

The Transcendental Murder / The Minuteman Murder

Scholarly infighting can get a lot more violent than most outsiders realize, but usually that violence is confined to the printed page. Not so in Concord, Mass., where the arrival of Homer Kelly, an expert on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, has stirred up passions concerning a manuscript that may or may not have been written by Henry David Thoreau. Things come to a head during the town?s annual re enactment of Paul Revere?s famous ride, when one of the ?Minutemen? turns up dead, still in full Revolutionary regalia. Accustomed to little more than the odd stolen bicycle, the local police are way over their head, but Kelly?in this, his first outing?proves as gifted at sleuthing as he is at scholarship.

Natural Enemy

Edward Heron died gasping for breath, yellow jackets swarming around him. Had his asthma finally killed him…
or something more sinister? Heron’s death affects many people in his small New England community: spinster sisters, a real estate developer with an eye on Edward’s property and a long time neighbor, Buddy Whipple. Enter Homer Kelly, another neighbor, also a Thoreau scholar and an ex detective. With the help of his nephew, an amateur naturalist, he goes to work on the case. ‘Everything is just right. A wry perceptive talent at his best.’ The New Republic

Emily Dickinson is Dead

Emily Dickinson noted ‘death’s tremendous nearness’ in one of her poems. Of course, she’d been dead 100 years when her admirers came to Amherst to celebrate her at a memorial symposium. Among them was Homer Kelly, distinguished Thoreau scholar and ex detective, who had himself dealt with murder a form of death in the past. To his amazement he finds himself once again embroiled in sudden death when murder stalks the symposium.

Good and Dead

Homer Kelly is back…
a distinguished Thoreau scholar and professor of American literature, also an ex detective for Middlesex County. But for now he’s camped out at a small New England church, trying to figure out why so many parishioners are ending up dead so soon. Homer’s job is to untangle murders from natural death. He finds the flock, so devout on Sundays, capable of breaking most commandments the other six days. ‘Keeps you on edge from start to finish.’ Publisher’s Source

Murder at the Gardner

Tadpoles in the fountain lead to murder in the corridor of Boston’s IsabellaStewart Gardner Museum. The trustees call in Homer Kelly, ex cop and Harvardlecturer, to solve the case.

The Dante Game

The Dante Game takes Homer Kelly to magnificent, mysterious Florence, where he finds himself entangled in a mystery of murdered lovers, the disappearance of a star pupil, and a hero*in ring shut down by the Pope’s antidrug campaign.

Divine Inspiration

Jane Langton returns with her ‘most inventive and exhilarating Homer Kelly mystery’ New York Times Books Review. At a church in Boston, an abandoned baby suddenly appears. Who is he? Organist Alan Starr and Homer Kelly team up to find out with possibly deadly results.

The Shortest Day

In the midst of the traditional Christmas Revels in Cambridge, the jealous husband of an attractive stage director turns the pageantry into an unhappy affair, bringing Homer Kelly to the scene in his eleventh case. Tour.

The Face on the Wall

Children’s book illustrator Annie Swann has built her dream house, where she’s painting a thirty five foot wall with a rich, complex mural of fairy tales and folklore. But again and again however often she paints it out there appears on the wall a mysterious, eerie face. When Annie finds her tenants’ re*tarded eight year old son lying dead beneath it, and his yuppie parents about to sue her for all she’s worth, it’s clearly a case for her uncle, Homer Kelly. Can Homer banish the wickedness from Annie’s paradise, save her masterpiece, and scent out a cold blooded murderer? Jane Langton’s elegant prose and beguiling line drawings tell a tale of good and evil more than worthy of the Brothers Grimm. From Jane Langton, ‘her best yet’ Homer Kelly mystery St. Louis Post Dispatch

The Thief of Venice

In Homer Kelly’s new adventure the fabled squares and palaces of Venice contain holy relics, hidden gold, and an occasional defunct human being. Never has Jane Langton been more enchanting or thrilling than in her fourteenth Homer Kelly mystery, The Thief of Venice. In a setting splendidly evoked by her line drawings, characters from the wryly innocent to the brilliantly sinister play out a serpentine story of divine mystery, immortal art, and mortal remains. The seductive city of Venice has lured Homer Kelly to a rare books conference and his wife, Mary, into the streets of the city, armed with a camera. While Homer basks in the Biblioteca Marciana, Mary’s snapshots reveal more than she intended. In one of her simple tourist images of San Marco, gondolas on jade green canals, the Rialto Bridge, the labyrinthine streets, the house of Tintoretto, and the Ghetto Vecchio, appears the figure of a missing woman. Thus begins a case that leads to a bona fide miracle and the discovery of a treasure painfully recalling the fate of Venetian Jews in World War II, culminating in an elaborate chase across a maze of ancient bridges as the acqua alta water rises up out of the canals, threatening all Venetians!

Murder at Monticello

While visiting Monticello for the bicentennial celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, Homer Kelly is disturbed to discover our third president in trouble with historians over the issues of slavery and Sally Hemings. Meanwhile, Thomas Dean, a mysterious trespasser, is disturbing the work of Homer’s former student, Fern Fisher, who is struggling to restore Jefferson’s reputation. On top of everything else, a serial killer who preys on young women is on the loose. When Tom Dean is arrested as a suspect, Homer, perpetual friend of the underdog, takes on his case. All of these intrigues converge at Jefferson’s bicentennial celebration, where, from among the throngs of visitors, the killer has selected his next victim. Can Homer discover the killer’s identity before the next attack?

The Escher Twist

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is home to Homer and Mary Kelly, Harvard University, the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and Leonard Sheldrake. Leonard, Homer’s friend, often compares the many faceted Cambridge to a favorite engraving, filled with strange power and wonder, by the twentieth century Dutch artist Maurits Escher. So he is thrilled when Cambridge hosts an Escher exhibit. There, Leonard is smitten by a mysterious woman in a green coat named Frieda who is equally enthralled by the artist’s brilliance. But Frieda hurries off without divulging her last name, her address, or her phone number. Despite their all too brief encounter, Leonard is now desperately in love with this elusive woman and desperate to find her. Homer and Mary offer to help, but soon their search takes on the aspect of an Escher etched labyrinth in which they will encounter past murders and present secrets, modern fortune tellers and the graveyard ghosts of Mount Auburn. A feast of art, erudition, intrigue, and humor, The Escher Twist is a fantastic read for Jane Langton’s legion of fans.

The Deserter

From the winner of Bouchercon’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Nero Wolfe Award, and a Newbery Honor Award, a baffling, lavishly illustrated new Homer Kelly extravaganza Most of the Harvard men who were killed at Gettysburg died as valiant heroes. But according to Mary Kelly’s family lore, one of her ancestors was a deserter. In setting out to clear his name, Mary and her husband, the brilliant and lovable Pro fessor Homer, uncover what may have been a very dastardly deed indeed. An intriguing blend of superbly researched fact and fiction, Jane Langton’s seventeenth Homer Kelly mystery will be hailed as one of the stellar achievements of a distinguished career.

Saint Francis and the Wolf

Saint Francis was born in 1182, the son of a wealthy merchant. After a swashbuckling youth in Assisi, he had a change of faith and decided to live the life that he ascribed to Jesus, one of poverty and abstinence. He gave away everything he owned. His father disowned him. But over the years he drew to himself a substantial following of men and women and died revered and beloved in 1225. Three years later he was canonized as Saint Francis of Assisi by Pope Gregory IX. This lovely retelling of one of the lesser known of the Saint Francis lessons 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 Francis heard of their plight and came to their rescue. Unbelievingly, the villagers watched from the ramparts as Brother Francis called to the wolf, tamed it with his tenderness, and made it pledge that if the people of Gubbio would care for it, he would do them no harm. He took the pledge and lived in harmony with the citizens of the city until his death. Jane Langton has retold the legend with her usual lucidity and grace, and Ilse Plume, an Italophile and the illustrator of three previous Godine books, has supplied the rectos with illustrations that glow with the intensity of Renaissance jewelry. A perfect gift for Easter or anyone who embraces the relationship between man and the natural world.