Below is the complete list of Carolyn Keene’s The Dana Girls Mystery Stories, Second Set books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of The Dana Girls Mystery Stories, Second Set Books
About The Dana Girls Mystery Stories, Second Set
The second set of The Dana Girls Mystery Stories represents both a revival and continuation of the adventures of teenage sleuths Louise and Jean Dana. Published by Grosset & Dunlap from 1972 through 1979 under the Carolyn Keene house name, this version is unusual because most of its seventeen volumes were not new stories. The first thirteen were revised and renumbered editions of books from the earlier Dana Girls series, while only the final four were newly written mysteries. Understanding that publishing history helps explain why the numbering can seem inconsistent when older and newer editions are compared.
Louise and Jean remain the same adventurous orphaned sisters established in the original series. They attend Starhurst School for Girls in Penfield and spend vacations with their guardians, Aunt Harriet and Uncle Ned Dana. School life, travel, family acquaintances, and apparently ordinary incidents repeatedly lead them toward mysteries involving missing objects, suspicious strangers, hidden identities, unexplained phenomena, and crimes that take them well beyond the boundaries of their boarding school. Their independence gives the books something of the spirit of Nancy Drew, while the partnership between two sibling detectives creates a dynamic closer to the Hardy Boys.
When the series returned in 1972 after several years out of print, Grosset & Dunlap did not begin with an entirely new adventure. Instead, six of the later books from the first series were revised and became numbers 1 through 6 of the new sequence. Earlier volumes were then brought back in a rearranged order until The Ghost in the Gallery, originally number 17, appeared as number 13 in the second set. The reissued books also received new cover treatment. Consequently, titles such as Mystery of the Stone Tiger, The Haunted Lagoon, and The Winking Ruby Mystery belong to both publishing eras even though their series numbers differ.
The most significant change arrives with the four concluding volumes. Beginning with The Curious Coronation in 1976, the second set finally moves beyond repackaged material and provides genuinely new Dana Girls adventures. The Hundred-Year Mystery followed in 1977, Mountain-Peak Mystery in 1978, and The Witch’s Omen in 1979, which became the final official volume of the series.
Although every book carries the Carolyn Keene name, Keene was a Stratemeyer Syndicate house pseudonym rather than an individual author. The Dana Girls had been written by several people during their long history, including Leslie McFarlane and Mildred Wirt Benson. Harriet Stratemeyer Adams wrote the later original-series volumes that were reused for the second set, as well as all four new stories published from 1976 through 1979. This makes the second set unusually consistent in underlying authorship despite its mixture of revised and newly created material.
The second set is therefore not a separate reboot of Louise and Jean or a new continuity requiring readers to disregard their earlier adventures. It is better understood as a 1970s relaunch: selected later mysteries were revised, rearranged, and presented as a fresh sequence before four new books extended the sisters’ story. For collectors especially, that distinction matters because identical titles can carry completely different numbers depending on whether the edition belongs to the original 1934–1968 run or the 1972–1979 second set.