Shirley Damsgaard Books in Order

If you want the full series in order: Witch Way to Murder → Charmed to Death → The Trouble With Witches → Witch Hunt
If you want the later books, once the world is established: The Witch Is Dead → The Witch's Grave → The Seventh Witch
If you want the family-history finale: The Seventh Witch
If you prefer a short paranormal sampler: Shadow Tales

Shirley Damsgaard grew up on a farm near Winterset, Iowa, as an only child, and her early ambitions were not especially literary. She later joked that, at five, she wanted to be a princess. Real life took her somewhere much more grounded, into marriage, children, and years of work with the United States Postal Service.

For about three decades, Damsgaard worked for the Postal Service, including many years as postmaster in Stuart, Iowa. She described herself as a small-town Iowan and said she had never lived more than fifty miles from Winterset. That sense of place matters in her fiction too. Even when ghosts or visions show up, her stories stay rooted in ordinary Midwestern routines.

She came to writing later than many authors do. Around age forty-eight, encouraged by family and inspired in part by an aunt who wrote all her life, Damsgaard decided to give it a serious try. Her first attempt was a romance novella, and by her own account it was terrible. She took a writing class in Dubuque, kept working, and listened when her late husband suggested she try mysteries instead, pointing out that she had a habit of figuring out movies before the ending.

That advice changed everything.

Drawing on her long interest in the paranormal, she created Ophelia Jensen and Abby, the granddaughter-and-grandmother team at the center of Witch Way to Murder. Published in 2005, the novel introduced a small-town librarian who would rather ignore her psychic abilities and an older woman who is much more comfortable with witchcraft and intuition. The book was nominated for the 2006 Agatha Award for Best First Novel, and Damsgaard quickly followed it with more entries in the same world.

Readers who pick up Charmed to Death, The Trouble With Witches, Witch Hunt, and The Witch's Grave usually come for the mystery, then stay for the family dynamics. Damsgaard likes everyday people with messy feelings, loyal friends, and problems that feel human even when the setup is paranormal. Her books mix murders, missing people, visions, and ghosts with library work, town gossip, road trips, and the steady give-and-take between Ophelia and Abby. By the time of The Seventh Witch, the series leans more deeply into family history and the question of what it means to inherit a gift you never asked for.

She also wrote short fiction. In 2001 she won first-place recognition for short fiction in the John Tigges Writing Contest, and in 2011 she published Shadow Tales, a collection of seven paranormal stories. That book included The Gift, the short piece that helped spark the Ophelia and Abby series. It is a good snapshot of what she does well, taking an everyday setting and letting the uncanny quietly move in.

She built a writing life without leaving her small-town roots behind.

In biographical notes from her publishing years, Damsgaard wrote about how reading had always been her escape during stressful times, and how much it meant when readers said her books gave them a few hours away from their own troubles. She also mentioned gardening, needlepoint, and keeping close to family, with grown children and grandchildren within driving distance. That all feels of a piece with her work. Her fiction may deal in witches, psychics, and old secrets, but it is just as interested in home, habit, and the comfort, and occasional strain, of people who know one another well.