Cassiopeia Vitt Adventures Books in Order

These novellas pull Cassiopeia Vitt out of Cotton Malone’s shadow and let her take the lead. Cassiopeia is an heiress, engineer, and risk‑taker who prefers climbing cliffs and crawling through ruins to sitting in boardrooms. When we meet her in these stories she’s juggling a long‑running project—rebuilding a thirteenth‑century style castle in France—with unfinished business from her own past, from family secrets to dangerous old enemies.

The Balkan Escape drops her into Bulgaria’s Rila Mountains, chasing the buried tomb of a Thracian king as a favor to Henrik Thorvaldsen. A clandestine Russian mining operation has other plans for the site, turning an archaeological puzzle into a life‑or‑death escape. In The Museum of Mysteries, a visit to a friend’s private collection in the hilltop village of Èze erupts into a robbery, a strange alchemical discovery, and a sprint between southern France and Paris.

In The Lake of Learning, the castle project itself uncovers trouble: an ancient book of hours surfaces in the foundations, pointing toward the persecuted Cathars and a relic many people are still willing to kill over. Cassiopeia follows clues through Carcassonne, Montségur, and caves under the Pyrenees while two bitter rivals wage a private war around her. The mystery forces her to think about what kind of refuge she’s actually trying to build with those new stone walls.

The House of Long Ago turns inward, to her childhood home on a Spanish bluff above the Mediterranean. Planning to sell the estate and donate her father’s art, she discovers every painting in his cherished collection may be a forgery. The search for answers leads through hidden vaults in Andorra, a sleek yacht, and wartime secrets on the streets of Paris, pushing Cassiopeia to re‑evaluate the stories she was told about her parents.

By The End of Forever the stakes are brutally personal. A mentor Cassiopeia loves is murdered, her castle is attacked, and threats ripple outward toward Cotton. The investigation moves along rocky Spanish coasts, medieval building sites in France, and an old republic in Italy, confronting a villain who has shaped her life from the shadows. The tension isn’t just whether she’ll survive, but what revenge might cost her if she goes too far.

Co‑written with M. J. Rose, these tales feel slightly moodier and more intimate than the main Cotton Malone novels. They lean into art, memory, and the possibility that the past can intrude in ways we don’t fully understand, yet they still deliver chases, shoot‑outs, and clever historical twists. You can read them on their own or alongside the larger series; either way, they round out Cassiopeia as more than a side character, giving her hard choices and victories that are entirely her own.