Wings of Destiny — Catherine Lanigan

The descendent of a founding San Francisco family recounts the story of her grandfather, a man whose greed helped shape West Coast history, including such infamous chapters as white slavery, until his downfall in the great 1906 earthquake.

Jefferson Duke, a man completely motivated by his indomitable belief in his ancestor's dream that his destiny is to build the golden city of San Francisco. However, in order to fulfill his ancestral destiny, Jefferson must sacrifice the most precious of life's gifts: his heart. From the moment he sets foot on the shore of the trading post Yuerba Buena, Jefferson creates and perpetuates the lie that leads to his own inevitable destruction. Here the personal and the historical coincide, as the author deftly interweaves Jefferson's downfall with the infamous San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Jefferson's destruction reveals the evil, greed, lust and family revenge between the House of Duke and the House of Chen. Theirs is the timeless struggle between good and evil, and it is a struggle that must be exposed. Only Jefferson's granddaughter Barbara, a journalist for The Call, can root out the facts about the city's graft and corruption, as well as the white slavery that still exists on the Barbary Coast. However, in order to expose these evils and eliminate them, Barbara must betray Jefferson and, ultimately, learn the truth about herself and her own secret past.