 Penguin Random House Audio Presents, Shaker by Scott Frank, Read For You by Deon Graham. Part 1 Prologue A swarm of nearly 700 small earthquakes, most in the 2.0 to 3.0 range, rattled the Mojave Desert between June and September. The little shakers, as geologists began referring to them, were centered mainly in and around the area of Joshua Tree National Park, about 130 miles to the southeast of Los Angeles. There were few injuries, all minor, and the only reported fatality happened when a 26-year-old rock climber named Eric Camot, bivouacked for the night a few hundred feet up the face of a granite formation known as G-string, fell out of his mummy bag. There was, however, some question as to whether it was one of the tiny quakes that caused Camot's fall, or the handful of granddaddy purple gummies he'd ingested a few hours earlier, the residual amount of cannabis in his system being well over the 1.5 number that ultimately pinged the Richter scale. The explanation for the sudden seismic frenzy was sourced to the Long California Drought, by then in its sixth year. Groundwater, having seeped deeper and deeper into the parched and panting earth, was steadily building up pressure, while at the same time lubricating the myriad underground plates that made up the Pinto Mountain Fault, thereby making it a lot easier for the ground to move. And move it did. By the first week of September, the Pinto Mountain Quakes had grown stronger. Eventually, one of them tipped the rickie at 4.2 and gave a hard shove to the bigger Rialto Colton Fault in Riverside, provoking a 5.0 roller that did little more than set off car alarms, knock a few soccer trophies off shelves, and, most damagingly, send shards of broken glass into the salad bar at an Olive Garden in San Dimas. Less than 24 hours later, the still-settling fault under the Rialto Colton Basin gave what amounted to a gentle pat on the back to a northward section of the much larger San Andreas Fault, which, in turn, delivered a more vigorous jolt to the Hollywood Fault to the west. These last two handoffs were made possible by a grant from ExxonMobil, whose extensive fracking around the Los Angeles Basin allowed for what might have remained a local event to now expand some 50 miles through newly created fractures in the bedrock. So it was on September 2 at four minutes after 10 p.m., a shaker with what would later be determined as a moment magnitude of 7.1, a modified Markali intensity of 9, violent, and ground accelerations that went to full 2 Gs grabbed the city of Los Angeles by the throat and throttled it like a wolf on a weasel for a full 22 seconds. The worst damage was in how- Sample complete. Ready to continue?