1906

James Dalessandro's 1906 is a fictionalized account of the days leading up to and the aftermath of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Annalisa Passarelli, the music and arts reported for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, leads readers through a rollicking recounting of the earthquake and subsequent fire - as well as her dealings with both the very cream of San Francisco society and its seedy underside of thugs and shanghaiers, pimps and prostitutes, and perhaps worst of all, politicians.

I really, really liked this book. It is well-written and fast paced; a chronicle of both disaster and corruption on the grandest scale. Murder and mystery seamlessly intersect with romance, and trust me, that's a rare quality. My only complaint, and it's a relatively minor one, is that the reader is introduced to a vast number of characters, some of whom simply disappear from the story. Although Annalisa offers a plausible explanation at the end - this is her first hand account of the earthquake, helped along by the occasional personal correspondence or diary - I felt a tad disappointed not to have a final glimpse at some of them, in particular the geology professor. This is but a minor quibble, though, when all is said and done.

While Passarelli, and her co-protagonist, Hunter Fallon, are Dalessandro's original creations, most of the other characters in his pages - from Enrico Caruso to Mayor Schmitz to Shanghai Kelly and Adam Rolf are either entirely true to form or based closely on real individuals from that time. Schmitz - who was indicted on corruption charges not long afterward (thank you, Wikipedia) - and his cronies fixed the death toll at 478, although the real toll was anywhere from 5,000-10,000. And if that weren't enough, the bad guys really did use the chaos and destruction of the disaster to exact revenge on their enemies, which is to say that Chicago in 1919 had nothing on San Francisco in 1906.

 Four stars.