Golden Gate Volcano

Here we go again - another tale of a great American city devastated by nuclear war, Godzilla, the Ebola virus, or natural disaster. In order to be worthy of notice, a new destroy-that-city tale would have to be a cut above its predecessors. The author has done his best to accomplish that here. The prologue takes place in St. Pierre, Martinique, in 1902, when the eruption of Mt. Pel?e killed 30,000.The action moves forward to California in 2012.US Geological Survey vulcanologist Cavan Monaghan and his soon-to-be lover, helicopter pilot Veronica (Ronnie) Wentworth, head up a group of environmentally devoted people trying to find a connection between a recent siege of moderate earthquakes and the appearance of hot springs in the counties north of San Francisco. The team includes a gay paramedic and his partner; a second-grade teacher; a sculptress who lives on a houseboat; a retired geology professor; a cross-dressing coroner's assistant, and a marine biologist. Other major characters: an arrogant newspaper columnist, the Hispanic Governor of California, the female President of the United States, a hypertensive salvage ship captain, an ingenious Army Corps of Engineers General whose lover is a zealous reporter, a pair of Pakistani ship dismantlers, Ronnie's wealthy and manipulative father, and assorted US senators, high-ranking military officers, and cabinet members. Cavan suspects that a major earthquake may be imminent. He is surprised that the USGS is playing down evidence of that earthquake in contravention of the agency's responsibility to alert the public to latent disasters. Cavan's data suggest that the earthquake might cause magma to surface somewhere nearby. Two people die in accidents involving superheated water - one of them in the Golden Gate Channel. Cavan stumbles on clandestine, seabed-drilling activity 50 miles offshore. The Secretary of the Interior and Cavan's superiors try to impede his investigation. Convinced that the government is blindsiding its c