In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was overcome by the violent shocks of an enormous earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale. The tremors and rumbling, affecting a swathe of California more than two hundred miles long, triggered a vast firestorm in the city, effectively destroying the gold rush capital that had stood there for half a century. Simon Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities to this extraordinary...

"P.R. Chandrasekhar, the celebrated professor of economics at Cambridge, is at a turning point. He has sacrificed his family for his career, but his conservative brand of economics is no longer in fashion, and yet again he has lost the Nobel Prize to a rival. His wife has left him for a free spirited West Coast psychiatrist and relocated to Boulder, Colorado. His son, a capitalist guru with a cult following, mocks his father's life work; his middle...

In California's Monterey Peninsula, a killer leaves roadside crosses along highways to mark future victims. Agent Kathryn Dance, a body language expert at the California Bureau of Investigation, investigates the case, discovering that not only is the killer using blogs and social networking sites to select his victims, but that he also is a troubled teenager bent on revenge. As Dance works towards catching her suspect, she finds her efforts hampered...

LAPD detective Harry Bosch simultaneously investigates a killer who has been operating undetected for thirty years and a political conspiracy that has its origins in his police department.

"Since former Marine Jack Morgan started Private, it has become the world's most effective investigation firm...Private's investigators are the smartest, the fastest, and the most technologically advanced in the world -- and they always uncover the truth. When his former lover is found murdered in Jack's bed, he is instantly the number-one suspect. While Jack is under police investigation, the mob strong-arms him into recovering $30 million in stolen...

"A is for Alibi" --A young woman, paroled after spending eight years in prison for murdering her slick, divorce lawyer husband, hires Kinsey Millhone, a private detective, to discover who really killed her husband. "B is for Burglar" --Finding wealthy Elaine Boldt seems like a quickie case to Kinsey Millhone. But Kinsey's case goes from puzzling to sinister as clues mount. "C is for Corpse" --Bobby Callahan, a young man scarred in an accident and...

Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a novel destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American dream. Rockwell "Rocky" Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved...

Boston rare-book dealer Peter Fallon and his girlfriend, Evangeline Carrington, are headed to California, where their search for a lost journal takes them into the history of Gold Rush. The journal follows young James Spencer, of the Sagamore Mining Company, on a spectacular journey from staid Boston, up the Sacramento River to the Mother Lode. During his search for a "lost river of gold," Spencer confronts vengeance, greed, and racism in himself...