Publisher's Synopsis
Set in the vice-ridden streets and alleys of old San Francisco and the hellish silver mines of the high Sierras, this fast-paced tale of treachery and betrayal recounts the last days of William Ralston, "the man who built San Francisco." Narrated in a waterfront garret by a Civil War veteran and disgraced policeman to a jaded newspaper editor, this page-turner is a confession of complicity in the degradation and destruction of a great man. The narrator, himself enslaved by his infatuation with a Chinese slave girl, becomes a deceitful instrument of the corruption that surrounds him, a corruption that ultimately leaves the novella's heroes and villains lost amidst "the tangled and impenetrable ruins of dreams."
