The Year Is 1941. Verna Wilensky Has Been Electrocuted In Her Bathtub, Leaving A Lower-middle-class Life, No Survivors, And A Bank Account Packed With Almost A Hundred Thousand Dollars. Mysterious Checks Have Consistently Come To Her For More Than Twenty Years, Most Drawn From A Bank In San Pietro, A Town Once Known As Eureka. Eureka Was A Town That Used To Be A Bootlegger's Paradise And A Gangster's Dream. Now It Is The Rebuilt Metropolis Where Sheriff Thomas Culhane Is Launching A Bid To Be The Golden State's Next Governor. But Something Just Might Threaten His Ambitions. As Bannon Digs Deeper Into Wilensky's Demise, He Unearths A Decades-old Secret That Starts In A Shootout, Builds To A Bloodbath, And Could End Up Within The Upper Echelons Of California's Elite, Forever Changing The Destiny Of A State.--book Jacket. Eureka. Preface; Eureka: A Prose Poem; Notes -- Biographical Note. Edgar Allen Poe ; [foreword By Sir Patrick Moore].