September 1899. Alice Mary, a sixteen-year-old whore staggers into a crib on Dawson City's Fourth Avenue bruised and bloody, awaking the preternatural senses of Lorelei, a mysterious and powerful woman visiting the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. The repercussions are far-reaching and as dramatic and stark as the landscape this sweeping epic is set in. The sequel to this novel is in 1906 on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco during the twelve days leading up to the earthquake, and it called The Broken Coast.