Every time a trilogy completes, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Today’s cake is in honor of Gerald Brandt’s San Angeles series. It opened with The Courier, which the B&N Sci-fi Fantasy Blog called “a darkly gripping vision of the future.” It was published in hardcover by DAW in March 2016. Here’s the description.

The first installment in the San Angeles trilogy, a thrilling near-future cyberpunk sci-fi series

Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level 2 trash in a multi-level city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border — a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of fourteen, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone’s help.

But a late day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients. Now she’s stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone, and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen.

Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level 1 streets. Fleeing from people that seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller — a member of an underground resistance group — only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn’t understand.

Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it’s only a matter of time until Miller’s resources and their luck run out….

The Rebel, the third and final volume, arrived in hardcover November 14.

[Click the images for epic-sized versions.]

Here’s the description.

Kris Merrill has lost everything. Her family when she was thirteen, her identity when she joined the anti-corporate movement, and now the man she loved. Living in a small room the resistance gave her, she feels alone. Abandoned.

A year ago, Kris’s life was torn apart when a delivery went wrong. The last year spent training with the anti-corporate movement had been the closest she’d ever gotten to normal.

Now, war has broken out between the corporations, and the lower levels of San Angeles are paying the price. Water and food are rationed. People are being ripped from their families in massive sweeps, drafted to fight. Those remaining live in a wasteland. The insurgents are trying to help, but Kris is being left out, given menial tasks instead of doing what she was trained for.

She is torn between working with the insurgents as they become more like the corporations they are fighting, and helping the people of the lower levels.

Caught in one of SoCal’s draft sweeps and being hunted by an enemy who will stop at nothing to have revenge are just the tip of the iceberg. Kris is pregnant, and she might have to choose between bringing down the corporations that destroyed her family or saving the life of her unborn son.

Here’s the complete publishing deets.

The Courier (320 pages, $7.99 paperback & digital, March 1, 2016)
The Operative (304 pages, $7.99 paperback & digital, November 1, 2016)
The Rebel (352 pages, $26 in hardcover/$12.99 digital, November 14, 2017)

All three are still in print and available from DAW.

See all of our recent coverage of the best SF and fantasy series here.