Delphic Women Books in Order

The Delphic Women trilogy takes some of the most notorious women of Greek myth and lets them tell their own stories. Rather than treating Medea, Cassandra, and Electra as stock figures of madness or vengeance, Kerry Greenwood reimagines them as complex people trying to navigate gods, politics, and desire in a dangerous Bronze Age world.

Each novel stands alone, but they share a loose continuity and a fascination with how legends are shaped by those in power. Medea follows a princess and priestess of Hekate in the distant kingdom of Colchis, guardian of the Golden Fleece. Greenwood alternates Medea's voice with that of Nauplius, an Argonaut and Jason's friend, to chart the famous quest from both sides. The book traces Medea's fall from her old life, her love for Jason, the compromises she makes, and the terrible price she pays when his ambition outruns his promises.

In Cassandra the scene shifts to Troy on the eve of the fabled war. Cassandra and her twin brother serve Apollo as priestess and priest, but a wager between capricious gods leaves her cursed with knowledge she cannot share. Greenwood adds an Achaean healer, Diomenes, to the cast and uses their intertwined fates to show how ordinary people become pawns in a conflict driven as much by pride and propaganda as by the theft of a single woman. Readers see the fall of Troy not as a neat moral tale, but as a slow disaster that crushes those who see most clearly.

Electra returns to Greece after the war to explore what happens when the cycle of revenge reaches the house of Atreus. Electra must live with the memory of her father Agamemnon's sacrifice of her sister, the murder of that father by her mother Clytemnestra, and the pressure on her brother Orestes to avenge the crime. Greenwood treats the famous vengeance plot as a human story about grief, loyalty, and the cost of carrying out the demands of gods and tradition.

Across the trilogy, the divine is present but not always comforting. Apollo, Aphrodite and other Olympians meddle, but their whims feel disturbingly like the pressures of politics, patriarchy, and war in any age. The books are rich with sensory detail, from temple rituals and sea journeys to crowded marketplaces, and they do not shy away from sexuality or violence, though the focus stays on characters' choices rather than on spectacle.

The Delphic Women novels are a good fit for readers who like mythic retellings that take women's inner lives seriously and are interested in how old stories can be made new without losing their tragic weight. You can read them in publication order or by whichever myth calls to you first.