It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — 1874 — and Gabe Beauchamps, the toughest Hell’s Kitchen thug Boss Twill ever threw out of New York, arrived in San Francisco with a great idea: to rob the mint with a little help from some very unusual local talent: Vangie. A delicate slip of a girl, the West’s loveliest and daintiest and deftest and most pessimistic pickpocket. Ittzy. San Francisco’s one-man spectator sport. The world’s clumsiest and luckiest escape artist. Francis (with an “i”). The fey dandy who designs cancan costumes and choreographs the entire San Francisco Fire Department into a lunatic frenzy. Flagway. The captain of the good ship San Andreas: the ancient mariner two has spent twenty drunken years at sea trying to find his way to a drugstore in Baltimore, Md. And Percival and Roscoe and Crung and the red-haired policeman who just may have been Mack Sennett’s grandpop— All mixed together and running like mad in the world’s first comedy romance suspense pirate western adventure novel— GANGWAY!
