Goodreads asked James Dalessandro:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

James Dalessandro After I wrote Bohemian Heart, and it was very well received by reviewers, I wanted to continue to explore San Francisco history for its amazing stories. I discovered Glady Hansen's "Denial of Disaster" in which she described the lies and cover ups of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. The official death toll was 479, an abomination. More than 6,000 people died. The day before the earthquake, the entire city administration was about to be arrested on massive corruption charges, a plot that was hatched six months earlier in Theodore Roosevelt's office at the White House. Some of the men who were about to be arrested fought back at their enemies. They used the fire and chaos to paint themselves at the great heroes of the holocaust. Then you have Enrico Caruso singing at the Opera House five hours before the earthquake struck. You cannot invent this stuff. I believe in historical fiction, not historical fraud: I set out to destroy the "Official Story" as the real fraud.

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