Francesca Flores Books In Order

Publication Order of The City of Diamond and Steel Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Francesca Flores
Francesca Flores is a linguist, writer, and a traveler and she grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She began writing at a young age after she read every fantasy book she was able to get her hands on.

In the first grade, she first wrote about dragon-taming princesses and young girls that lived on the moon. When she was eight years old, she found the first of the Harry Potter books in a friend’s house and would not set it aside until she finished it. This cemented her love of all things fantasy.

When she wrote in her younger years, writing for a living was not something she saw as a career. Francesca always saw it as something she did as a hobby. How she grew up wound contributing quite a bit to her writing, more than she thought it would.

She lived in two different worlds while she grew up. One was the private school she went to, where she had to have excellent grades. And the home life in Pittsburgh, where she was from but wound up feeling like an alien due to the opportunities going to her school allowed her. She had to put on an act in both communities each and every day and act like she belonged at her school. In her community, she was seen as the one that would go off to college and make something better for herself. It was writing that anchored her each and every day.

While in both university and high school, her love of writing persisted. While she was commuting between school and work, she wrote as much as she possibly could. Francesca began working toward becoming a published author after she posted a first draft online in the year 2011 and got plenty of constructive and positive feedback.

She realized that she still had some work to do and worked for another six years, writing multiple manuscripts and got feedback on those before having enough confidence to start querying for the first time in the year 2017.

During college, she experienced homelessness, which reminded her of her roots while growing up in an impoverished community that was marred by drugs and violence. Because of this, she changed her tone of writing and started writing about morally-gray, complex characters that begin their journeys without a thing in their pockets except for their dreams.

Francesca enjoys writing fantasy with atmospheric and dynamic settings that try to show how society will change through history and how these changes impact the characters living there. She writes for impoverished teens and kids so they can see themselves as the heroes.

Francesca got a degree in International Relations and Linguistics in San Francisco and worked a corporate job for a period before looking to get her novels published. She concentrated on subjects such as Migration Studies and Latin American Studies.

Her multiracial background, as well as her experiences studying abroad in Japan and performing migration research projects in such places as Morocco, Western Europe, and Northern Europe have all contributed to her multicultural and multilingual outlook that influences her in everything she writes.

After she graduated in the year 2015, she spent three years as a Corporate Travel Manager as well as an occasional travel writer in the city of San Francisco.

She was a Pitch Wars mentor for the year 2018, and is one of the readers for the serial YA anthology Foreshadow.

While not reading or writing, she enjoys dancing ballet and jazz, visiting different trails and parks around San Francisco, watching a new drama, traveling, and practicing trapeze and contortion. She has danced ballet and jazz for the majority of her life. Because of these skills she has, her heroes wind up having similar ones, too.

Francesca started writing her debut novel, “Diamond City”, while she was still working as a corporate travel manager. It was released in the year 2020 by Wednesday Books.

“Diamond City” is the first novel in the “Diamond City” series and was released in the year 2020. Welcome to a place called Diamond City, where secret magic can either get you murdered or save your life. Meet Aina Solis, whose wit is just as sharp as her blade.

When Aina Solis was twelve years old, she was pulled off the streets that she was sleeping on to be trained to be one of the most feared assassins in all of Sumerand. This place is a kingdom founded by immigrants and then built by magic, and recently has been transformed by an industrial revolution. Magic has been outlawed, Sumerand has been divided by those that are wealthy off the new factories and the ones that got left behind, with their stomachs empty and their culture gutted.

Aina gets the most dangerous and lucrative job of her entire career, murdering a wealthy industrialist called Kouta, she knows that it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to leave behind her impoverished roots in the past for good. The pay will give her enough to make her free from Kohl, her boss’s thumb. The job goes sour and Kouta is able to escape, and winds up without a penny to her name and in Kohl’s crosshairs, somebody who is chomping at the bit to show to all the world what will happen to anybody that fail him. The wind up dead.

Aina, with Kohl hot on her heels, is close to running out of time to locate Kouta and finish off what she began. The closer she gets to killing the guy, the more she starts asking some questions that assassins are never supposed to start asking. Who wants this guy dead? Why? In this city filled with hidden magical dens, half-constructed subway tunnels, secret weapons markets, and spiders the size of wolves, Aina finds a conspiracy that might rewrite the history of the city. And if it isn’t stopped, it would sink her country into a catastrophic war.

The book is well paced and entertaining with high stakes and characters who are able to make their way into your heart. Readers enjoyed the grimy, gritty, smoke filled streets in Koshima right from the beginning. Flores delivers a novel for readers who come from nothing and have been taught to claw their way to something more.