Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco

In this masterful work of true crime, Krist (The Mirage Factory) wraps a detailed portrait of a booming late-19th-century San Francisco around an engrossing account of a scandalous murder. In 1870, a woman named Laura Fair shot her lover, prominent attorney A.P. Crittenden, aboard a ferry from Oakland to San Francisco. Krist begins the narrative with a retelling of the murder from Fair’s perspective. Crittenden was on the boat with his wife, Clara, whom he’d been promising to divorce for seven years; fed up with his lies, Fair shot him through the heart. The narrative then rewinds to recount the lives of Fair and Crittenden before the killing and to illustrate the social climate of San Francisco, which had recently grown from a “raucous and untamed frontier town” into the nation’s 14th-largest city. With residents and city leaders aspiring to more growth and greater sophistication, Fair’s actions came under intense scrutiny, prompting the prosecution to call for the death penalty. Krist recreates Fair’s two trials—she was eventually acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity—with meticulous research and a novelist’s flair for drama. This top-shelf blend of history and entertainment is as edifying as it is exciting. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Mar.)