A Thrilling San Francisco Murder Mystery - an Editorial Review of "The Twisted Road" by A. B. Michaels

Book Blurb:

Jonathan Perris Can’t Save His Clients…Until He Saves Himself

1907

Rising from the devastation of a massive earthquake and fire, San Francisco is once again on the move. But a strike by streetcar drivers threatens to halt the Golden City in its tracks. Protests turn to violence and violence leads to death. Soon a young guard is convicted of willfully killing a protester and the public is out for blood.

Jonathan Perris, an immigrant attorney from England, has opened a law firm with an eye toward righting wrongs, and the guard’s conviction may fall into that category. But the talented barrister soon finds his newfound career shaken by a tragic event: the gruesome murder of the beautiful and mysterious Lena Mendelssohn—a woman he’s been squiring around town. It’s difficult to run a law firm when you’ve been arrested for murder.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/7O9O8c

Author Bio:

A native of California, A.B. Michaels holds masters’ degrees in history (UCLA) and broadcasting (San Francisco State University). After working for many years as a promotional writer and editor, she turned to writing fiction, which is the hardest thing she's ever done besides raising two boys. She lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in Boise, Idaho, where she is often distracted by playing darts and bocce, learning pinochle, and trying to hit a golf ball more than fifty yards. Reading and travel figure into the mix, leading her to hope that sometime soon, someone invents a 25+ hour day. Her historical fiction series, “The Golden City,” explores America’s Gilded Age and its effect on characters, both actual and fictional, while her contemporary series, “Sinner’s Grove,” follows descendants of The Golden City as they navigate today’s equally treacherous waters. She is currently expanding both series.

Editorial Review:

To read The Twisted Road: A Barrister Perris Novel by A. B. Michaels is to enter a city already vibrating with tension, as if the streets themselves have begun to speak. Some historical novels recount events as though arranging relics carefully behind glass. Michaels, however, does something altogether different. Her story rises from within the commotion of a society unsettled by change, so that history is not merely observed but heard in the rumble of streetcars, glimpsed in restless crowds, and sensed in the uneasy negotiations between authority and dissent. The result is a narrative that feels less like a reconstruction of the past and more like a memory surfacing through the fog of time.

The novel opens in upheaval. A demonstration gathers outside the United Railroads car barns in San Francisco, where a strike has drawn workers and replacement labour into an uneasy and volatile proximity. The protest grows, voices rising in that peculiar rise and fall of public anger—half outrage, half hope. Then the gunshot comes. A man falls amid the confusion, and what history will later call “Bloody Tuesday” erupts into being. Michaels does not treat this moment as just a moment in history; rather, she renders it with the strange immediacy of a crowd suddenly aware that events have tipped beyond ordinary control which relates to current world conditions. One senses the clang of metal rails beneath passing streetcars, the murmur swelling into shouts, the thin line between order and chaos dissolving almost imperceptibly. In that instant the city reveals itself not merely as a setting but as a living bruised organism alert to its own instability.

San Francisco in these pages is a place still recovering from the vast dislocation of the 1906 earthquake. Reconstruction has brought ambition and prosperity to some, but it has also deepened the divisions between those who command wealth and those who labour to produce it. The streetcar strike becomes, therefore, more than a dispute over wages or conditions. It is a manifestation of broader anxieties about power questioning who holds it, who resists it, and what ideologies whisper through the gathering crowds. Michaels captures this atmosphere with a quiet precision. Political theories circulate through union halls and cafés; revolutionary rhetoric finds its way into conversations that hover somewhere between conviction and performance. Everywhere there is the sense that the city’s future is being debated not only in courtrooms and boardrooms but also in studios, workshops, and crowded public squares.

Into this unsettled landscape steps Jonathan Perris, a barrister trained in Britain and newly navigating the peculiar intricacies of American law. Perris is not introduced with flourish. Instead, he appears almost tentatively, a thoughtful observer moving through a society whose rules he understands only gradually. This restraint proves one of the novel’s great strengths. Perris is compelling precisely because he resists the dramatic gestures of the conventional detective. His approach is deliberate, almost meditative. He listens more than he speaks; he notices small inconsistencies in testimony; he traces the faint outlines of motive that others dismiss as irrelevant. Michaels allows the investigation to unfold with patience, granting the reader time to inhabit Perris’s reasoning as it gathers shape and momentum.

Truth, in Perris’s world, rarely appears as a sudden revelation. Rather, it emerges slowly, like an image developing in dim light. Witnesses speak from positions shaped by loyalty or resentment. Evidence carries the subtle weight of political implication. Each discovery seems to complicate the matter rather than resolve it. Yet Perris persists with a kind of quiet faith in the possibility that coherence exists somewhere beneath the confusion. In this sense, the investigation becomes not merely a search for a culprit but a meditation on the nature of justice itself, and how it survives within systems strained by public anger and private ambition.

The individuals who surround Perris contribute richly to this exploration. Cordelia Hammersmith stands out as a figure of particular interest and intelligence. She is neither ornamental nor merely supportive; rather, she meets Perris as an intellectual equal, her insights sharpening the inquiry at crucial moments. Their partnership unfolds with understated grace, grounded less in dramatic conflict than in shared curiosity. One senses between them a mutual recognition: that the pursuit of truth demands both patience and courage.

Another presence, altogether different yet equally memorable, is Dove, whose work as an investigator draws the narrative away from respectable offices and into the city’s shadowed corners. Through Dove, Michaels reveals another San Francisco, one composed of dimly lit cafés, cluttered studios, and gathering places where artists and political dreamers debate the shape of the future. These scenes carry an almost atmospheric richness. The reader glimpses canvases leaning against studio walls, hears arguments over labour rights echoing through rooms heavy with smoke and ideas. Yet there is also an undercurrent of irony: those who speak most passionately about revolution sometimes occupy positions far removed from the hardships endured by the workers they champion. Michaels does not condemn this contradiction outright; instead, she allows it to linger as one more complexity in a society attempting to redefine itself.

Throughout the novel, the physical city remains vividly present. Streetcars rattle along iron tracks, carrying passengers through districts alive with commerce and unrest. Buildings rise anew from the scars left by the earthquake, symbols of resilience yet also reminders of fragility. In such a place, stability feels provisional. Institutions—legal, political, economic—struggle to assert authority over forces that move unpredictably through the streets.

By the time the narrative approaches its conclusion, the meaning of the title begins to resonate with quiet inevitability. The “twisted road” refers not only to the investigation Perris undertakes but also to the broader journey toward justice in a society marked by competing visions of order and progress. Truth, Michaels suggests, seldom advances in a straight line. It bends beneath pressure, disappears behind influence, and reappears only through persistence and clarity of mind.

What lingers after the final page is less the solution to a mystery than the atmosphere the novel has so carefully constructed. Michaels offers a portrait of a city—and perhaps of our own modern society—caught between stability and transformation. Amid the clang of streetcars and the murmur of crowds, individuals struggle to discern what integrity demands of them. And like the winding streets of San Francisco itself, the path toward that understanding proves rarely direct.

In this way The Twisted Road achieves something quietly remarkable. It is both a historical mystery and a reflective study of how justice survives amid turbulence. The story closes, yet its echoes will remain with the reader for quite some time.

Five stars from The Historical Fiction Company and the “Highly Recommended” award of excellence.

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