Cassandra “Cass” Shipton is the narrator and protagonist of Dolores Stewart Riccio’s Cass Shipton series, a 10-book run of cozy mysteries blending Wiccan practice with crime-solving in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Cass is a divorced mother whose children have grown, and she runs a small business called Earthlore Herbal Preparations and Cruelty-Free Cosmetics. Her defining trait is clairvoyance: she has psychic visions that pull her and her friends into dangerous situations involving local crimes and missing persons. She also shares her Cape Cod home with Scruffy, a beloved dog whose thoughts she can hear.
Cass belongs to a circle of five Wiccan women who started as a study group and became a full coven. Her four closest friends are Fiona, a branch librarian and cookbook author; Heather, who manages a vitamin franchise; Phillipa; and Deidre, a volunteer at the local animal shelter. The group celebrates pagan holidays together, and when Cass’s visions point to trouble, the whole circle pitches in to investigate. The series began in 2003 with Circle of Five, where a grocery store encounter triggers a vision of a serial predator, and continued through nine more novels as the women take on new cases across Plymouth and the South Shore.
Reading Order
See the complete Cass Shipton reading order for all books in the series.