Auburn, California. 1898. Gold built the town. The railroad owns it. The smoke runs beneath them both.

By day, Quan keeps the railroad’s track true through Placer County — tie by tie, invisible to every passenger who rides over his work. By night he’s in a den beneath Auburn’s Chinese quarter, where the town’s respectable money comes to soften into smoke. He keeps his head down, his savings hidden, and a tin in his pocket.

Four other lives are bending toward that same cellar door: a sailor who came inland for gold and found the claims mostly worked out; two sons of a railroad fortune, down from the city with money to burn; a sheriff who keeps Auburn quiet by deciding what not to see — and Clara, his wife. 

Five lives. One small town. A collision none of them sees coming.

The den runs on a silence the whole town has agreed to keep. But 1898 is a bad year for silence. Exclusion law has every Chinese man in the county carrying papers to prove his right to exist, the newspapers want a cleanup worth printing, and somewhere above the cellar a raid is taking shape. It will be over in minutes. The story invented to explain it will have to hold forever.

Told in vignettes that drift, blur, and double back on themselves, Opium Ride moves the way the pipe does — slow, warm, and then all at once.

Opium Ride is a standalone novel — fiction set in a historical period, its real history documented in the Rabbit Holes