Steeplejack Books in Order

The Steeplejack books follow Anglet Sutonga, usually called Ang, a teenager who makes her living high above the streets of Bar-Selehm repairing chimneys, towers, and spires. That job is more than a neat hook. It tells you a lot about her right away. Ang survives by nerve, balance, and hard-earned skill, and she sees her city from angles most people never do.

Bar-Selehm is the real engine of the series. It is a sprawling industrial city shaped by wealth, labor, colonial tension, and racial hierarchy, with Lani, Mahweni, and Feldish communities living under different kinds of pressure. Hartley builds the politics into the streets, the roofs, the clubs, and the workplaces, so the setting never feels separate from the mystery. Every case Ang touches is also a case about how power works.

That is why the first book lands so well. A murdered apprentice and the theft of the city's great Beacon pull Ang out of manual labor and into investigation, but the deeper story is about who gets protected, who gets blamed, and who profits when a divided city is pushed toward fear. Ang is not a chosen one. She is smart, observant, and too stubborn to let a lie sit still.

This is fantasy built like a mystery series.

The books keep widening from there. Firebrand adds espionage, government secrets, and the disappearance of refugees, while Guardian turns the political heat up even further with a murder charge, a spreading illness, and a hard-line movement trying to reshape the city by force. The trilogy grows from detective story to resistance story, but it never loses the pleasure of clues, chases, and sharp reversals.

Ang is a big reason the series works. She is capable without being polished, brave without pretending fear does not exist, and often caught between communities that all want something different from her. Her voice keeps the books quick on their feet even when the material gets serious.

If you are deciding whether this is for you, think rooftop thriller, city mystery, and political fantasy all at once. Expect soot, danger, sharp class and race tensions, and a heroine who keeps climbing because looking away would be easier, but wrong.