The year is 1846, and war is brewing between the United States and Mexico. Under the pretext of a scientific research expedition, Lt. John C. Fremont arrives in Sutter's Fort with Kit Carson, famous Indian Scout, and a few men. Also arriving in Sutter's Fort is Cat Reilly, who has been widowed on the long trip west and is now in desperate circumstances. She becomes romantically involved with a Russian count as well as in Fremont and Carson's political...

"Bounty hunter John Tone is good at his job. Some would say ruthless. If there's killing to be done, he shows no mercy. In another time, far across the ocean, Tone lost the only person he's ever loved--and he's been dead inside ever since. That's the hand fate dealt him, and he'll play it out. But then a powerful criminal from San Francisco's notorious Barbary Coast makes him an offer he can't refuse, and Tone has to draw out six of his client's worst...

Diego de la Vega, the son of an aristocratic Spanish landowner and a Shoshone mother, returns to California from school in Spain to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for the weak and helpless.

In the summer of 1968, after traveling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.