Passage of the Hurricane (A Novel)

“The most essential San Francisco novel since The Maltese Falcon."
—Marcia DeSanctis, author of A Hard Place to Leave

Three crimes. Three centuries. One truth.

In 1990, San Francisco investigator George Krishna Walker battles corrupt police, international organized crime rings, and the ghosts of his own past to solve related cases that span 350 years.

He is hired by old flame Hannah Rose to investigate the death of her father, a former district attorney killed by a cable car in what police quickly dismiss as an accident. Walker and Hannah share a complicated past, and as he begins asking questions, old feelings resurface, along with troubling evidence that the death was anything but accidental. The deeper he digs, the clearer it becomes that the truth behind Harrison Rose’s death is far more dangerous than anyone imagined.

Walker’s search leads him through San Francisco neighborhoods—Chinatown, North Beach, the waterfront—where he relies on an eclectic network of allies, including a teenage forensics prodigy, a philosophizing taxi driver, Homicide Detail partners, and a waterfront psychic who shares his past in India. The investigation deepens when he and Hannah discover documents in her father’s possession connected to the Hurricane, a Gold Rush–era ship captained by her ancestor—and a priceless Inca dagger missing from her father’s house.

Those documents point to a larger mystery: an international artifact theft ring, a corrupt UC Berkeley archaeologist determined to locate the long-buried wreck of the Hurricane, and rumors of a legendary ransom of Inca gold tied to the ship’s cargo. As Walker follows the trail from San Francisco’s buried Gold Rush waterfront to the Peruvian jungle, he uncovers links to a long-dormant police corruption case—and finds himself pursued by dangerous men willing to kill to claim what they want.