Jane K. Cleland

Jane K. Cleland is an American mystery novelist and writing-craft author whose two Writer's Digest titles, Mastering Suspense, Structure and Plot and Mastering Plot Twists, both won the Agatha Award for best nonfiction. She is the author of the long-running Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series at St. Martin's Minotaur, now at fourteen novels, with short fiction in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. The series has been optioned for film and television development.

Mastering Suspense, Structure and Plot teaches writers how to build the tension that pulls readers through a story, regardless of genre, through thirteen no-fail plot construction techniques, Cleland's Plotting Road Map for adding twists, reversals, and moments of danger, and instruction on writing purposeful subplots, sharper description, deeper character development, and stronger sentences. Mastering Plot Twists drills into the specific craft of the reversal: the kinds of twists that surprise without cheating, how to plant and pay off, and how to control reader expectations through every act of the book.

Her newest craft book, Beat the Bots: An Author's Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Age of AI (Regalo Press, 2025), addresses the working novelist's place in a publishing landscape reshaped by generative AI. The Josie Prescott series, set on the New Hampshire coast and built around an antiques appraiser who keeps stumbling into murder, has won two David Awards for Best Novel and has been a finalist for the Agatha, Macavity, and Anthony Awards.

Cleland is part of the full-time English faculty at Lehman College, part of the City University of New York, a contributing editor for Writer's Digest magazine, former president of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and chair of the Wolfe Pack's Black Orchid Novella Award in partnership with Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. She holds an MFA from Western Connecticut State University and once owned a New Hampshire antiques and rare books business, which became the source material for the Josie Prescott series. She lives in New York City.