The Blast

San Francisco, 1916. The streets roiling: pitched battles between radical workers and the henchmen of industrial barons, and between a vibrant, largely Italian immigrant anarchist milieu and the forces of state and church. All in the looming shadow of Europe’s raging war, and of a fierce struggle over whether the U.S. should commit its might, and human fodder, to the slaughter in the trenches.

Into this maelstrom arrives Kate Jameson, a novice envoy from Washington tasked to secretly invest...