The Last Nightingale

Screenwriter Flacco nicely evokes the aftermath of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in his fiction debut, a novel of suspense. On the eve of the disaster, Sgt. Randall Blackburn, perhaps the one honest cop on the San Francisco force, patrols the grim Barbary Coast neighborhood, which has been plagued by a serial killer, whom the press has dubbed "the Surgeon," who castrates his victims. After the quake, Blackburn joins the frantic rescue efforts, in the course of which he meets 12-year-old Shane Nightingale, whose adoptive mother has been murdered by the Surgeon. In the rubble, Shane and Blackburn pursue the Surgeon, whose identity becomes known early on. Through the fiend's demented perspective we learn of a plague he plans to loose on the devastated city, but this plot line gets lost in the shuffle. The action devolves into a routine cat-and-mouse chase, building to an ending some readers will find maudlin. (June)