James Dalessandro has written a book that is absolutely impossible to put down. Your first temptation will be to race from one chapter to the next—resist the urge!
 
Slow down and enjoy the smallest details of character, plotting and deeply researched historical information. The terrifying moment when the earthquake strikes will keep your eyes drilled into the pages of this riveting book. The moments in between are filled with crime, corruption and compassion that will leave you breathless.
 
Simply put, 1906 is this year's best read—and next year's, too. —Melanie Morgan, Talk-Show Host, KSFO

Screenwriter and novelist Dalessandro (Bohemian Heart) pens an imaginative and dense interplay between fact and fiction in this story of corruption, crime lords and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Annalisa Passarelli, the Evening Bulletin's music critic, narrates the tale with a mix of first-person intimacy and cool omniscience. She's secretly helping the chief of detectives, Byron Fallon, gather dirt on a corrupt political syndicate headed by Adam Rolf, city attorney and power broker. Rolf (a fictional character) owns the "puppet-mayor,"? Eugene Schmitz (an actual person), and is supported by an army of goons and waterfront toughs led by the infamous Shanghai Kelly, who, as Dalessandro notes in his afterword, was actually dead by 1906. Byron aims to arrest the mayor, the police chief and the city attorney in one fell swoop, but when he is killed investigating a murder at the waterfront, it's up to his son Hunter, a Stanford graduate and fledgling police detective, to carry his mantle. Annalisa and Hunter appeal to an association of honest cops known as the Brotherhood (co-led by Hunter's brother, Christian), who are dedicated to destroying Rolf's machine, although Hunter also has personal vengeance on his mind. They secure incriminating evidence, but before justice can be served, the earthquake strikes, plunging the city into chaos. This plot-and all its subplots, one starring a beautiful Kansas runaway, another featuring tenor Enrico Caruso-might have worked beautifully, but Dalessandro employs too many B-movie theatrics, and the love story falls flat. Still, there's plenty of suspense to keep readers turning pages to the bittersweet conclusion. — Publisher's Weekly

Interwoven storylines—civic corruption, sex, high-profile murder, Enrico Caruso—lead up to, then involve the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Frustrated young newspaper reporter Annalisa Passarelli, who narrates, wants to cover politics but is consigned to cultural events like the upcoming performances of world-renowned tenor Enrico Caruso and rising dramatic actor John Barrymore. Nonetheless, Annalisa tracks the escalating war between the crimelords working the Barbary Coast (Shanghai Kelly, The Whale, and Scarface being three of the most notorious) and the overworked police force headed by righteous Lieutenant Byron Fallon. Byron's elder son Christian has followed in his father's footsteps, but younger son Hunter is attending Stanford. When a policeman is murdered while investigating a waterfront shanghaiing operation, Byron personally checks it out-and meets the same fate. Hunter and Christian, helped by Annalisa, follow a trail of graft and depravity that leads all the way up to the office of city attorney Adam Rolf, a highly respected citizen. Meanwhile, geologists tracking recent trends warn of the disaster to come, but the civic crooks put personal gain well above public safety. The lynchpin in a cabal that includes railroad magnates, crooked cops, and avaricious politicians, attorney Rolf regularly hires courtesans of the famous Madame Tessie Wall. Indeed, Kansas teenager Kaitlin Staley, dreaming of fame and fortune, runs away from her domineering father and straight into the arms of the predatory Wall and Rolf. Both Barrymore and Caruso are onstage the night before the early morning quake (Caruso's pre-performance rituals are outlined in amusing detail), and Dalessandro tracks a dozen other denizens of Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, Bush Street and elsewhere in the hours before the tremor. An action-packed final third dramatizes the quake and subsequent fire, and their impact on the sprawling cast of characters. Prelude to the disaster feels a bit like woolgathering, but Dalessandro (Bohemian Heart, 1993, etc.) pays off with an exciting and vivid depiction of history. — Kirkus Reviews

It is not every afternoon that the city's top brass take tea under the gilt-and-glass dome of the Garden Court in the Palace Hotel. But last week, San Francisco's new fire chief, Joanne Hayes-White—in her gold-braided uniform and signature ponytail—perched across the tea table from Alex Fagan, the former police chief who now heads the Mayor's Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security. The two people most accountable for the city's response in a disaster, Fagan and Hayes-White were on hand to support a new book about the San Francisco earthquake that promises to be a publishing sensation—and to warn that when the next monster quake hits, citizens must be prepared to play an active role in response to the emergency. — San Francisco Chronicle

James Dalessandro's 1906 is a bold, sweeping novel inspired by one of the biggest epic disasters in American history, the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. It's a richly textured, engrossing, and extraordinary tale.
— Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter

This gallop through earthquake-era San Francisco is loaded with admirable historical detail and reveals the raptor civic corruption as murderous as the San Andreas fault. — Oakley Hall, author of Ambrose Bierce and The Queen of Spades