City of the Saints Books in Order

D.J. Butler's City of the Saints is a steampunk-flavored alternate history set in 1859, as the United States edges toward civil war. In this version of the past, the Kingdom of Deseret has become a powerful independent state in the American West. Its future matters enough that rival governments are willing to send spies, agents, inventors, and soldiers toward Salt Lake City.

The city is full of strange machinery. Airships, steam vehicles, electric devices, and deadly experimental weapons give the setting a lively, slightly dangerous energy. But the inventions are never just decoration. They make Deseret valuable, especially when Orson Pratt's work on airship technology and a rumored phlogiston cannon could change the balance of power.

War is coming, and everyone wants an advantage.

The book brings together fictional characters and real historical figures, including Samuel Clemens, Richard Burton, Edgar Allan Poe, Brigham Young, and Orrin Porter Rockwell. Each arrives with different loyalties and goals. Clemens enters Deseret in a steam truck, Burton races west on the land-ferry Liahona, and Poe works in disguise as a spy with unsettling tools at hand.

That crowded cast is part of the fun. City of the Saints treats politics as a field of competing personal agendas, where a diplomatic mission can turn into a chase, an invention can become a weapon, and no one is sure who is working for whom. The story has espionage, sabotage, fights, travel, and plenty of oddball technology, but it also keeps its eye on the question of whether Deseret can stay independent when larger powers close in.

The novel was originally presented as connected shorter works and later collected as one larger book. That structure gives it a serial-adventure feel. The scope grows as new figures arrive and earlier events have consequences, while the central setting remains the city and kingdom everyone is trying to influence.

It is alternate history that likes gadgets and trouble.

Readers should expect a brisk story with a large cast, real history bent at unusual angles, and a playful willingness to put famous people in very unfamiliar situations. Start with City of the Saints, the complete entry point for this corner of Butler's work.