Avery Cates: The Burning City Books in Order

The Burning City sequence picks up in the later Avery Cates timeline, after the old world has already been smashed to pieces. The System is gone as a working order. Technology is failing. Ammunition is finite. Cities survive by closing their gates and hoping trouble lands somewhere else. Avery, who once understood his job in simple terms, point gun, solve problem, has somehow drifted into leadership, strategy, and the much less enjoyable business of trying to keep other people alive.

He hates that.

This branch of the series is more openly post-apocalyptic than the original Avery Cates novels. The short works that make up The Burning City, including The New World, The Devil's Bargain, The Long Siege, and The Dark Hunt, follow Avery as he gets pulled into an ugly campaign against the Archangel and the forces gathering around him. Humanity is running out of time, and not in an abstract way. Infrastructure is dying, populations are shrinking, and the last useful remnants of the old System have become the kind of prize people will gladly slaughter for.

A big part of the arc is Avery's uneasy relationship with Lucinda Barowel. She is the sort of ally Avery never really trusts, which of course means he keeps having to work with her. Their bargain pushes the story forward. To have any chance at resisting the Archangel, Avery needs access to transport, guns, information, and, eventually, the hidden stockpiles of System technology that might still change the balance. That sends him through sieges, negotiations, raids, and the kind of missions where the line between survival and suicide is mostly a matter of timing.

The setting does a lot of work here. These stories live in the aftermath, and the aftermath has texture. Fortified cities matter because the roads are death. A cache of bullets matters because no one is making more. Boats, generators, old data, and half-dead pieces of machinery become as important as armies. Somers leans into that scarcity. The result is a series that feels tense even when the characters are not actively shooting at each other, because every plan depends on resources that can vanish in a second.

Structurally, this run reads like a broken-up novel, which makes sense because the pieces build one long campaign. Each installment has its own pressure point, but the larger movement is clear: Avery is trying to get to the coast, outmaneuver the Archangel, and reach the buried remains of a technological future that may or may not still be usable. That gives the books a strong sense of forward motion. Even when Avery is trapped behind walls, the story feels like it is driving somewhere hard.

If the original Avery Cates books are grim cyberpunk noir, this sequence shifts toward siege fiction and end-of-the-world road war. The sarcasm is still there. So is Avery's talent for making every situation worse before he makes it better. But the mood is older, harsher, and more tired in an interesting way. This is a series about what happens after collapse, when there is still just enough world left to fight over.