A short century ago, San Francisco is the center of world attention. It is the 1890s, and inside the Barbary Coast next to Chinatown medicine is at war - between regular doctors like young Jack Pitman and quacks like Pierre Louthan.

David Jensen looks deep inside the Barbary Coast to present one of the most riveting and thoroughly researched historical novels ever written. It is the story of fascinating historical figures, romance and conflict, opium dens and tong wars, heroic attempts to save a king from death, the advent of X-rays, war in the Philippines, bubonic plague, and the great earthquake and fire of 1906.