This story deals, quite realistically, with the devastation following several major earthquakes in southern California. There is a handful of principle characters and we follow their plight throughout the book as each of them deals with their personal quest to survive. The book seems to be well researched and provides quite a bit of technical details about earthquakes, specfically in the southern California area.It is scary to imagine a disaster such as this, and the inability of the emergency services to deal with the damage and provide aid to the survivors.My only complaint is that the book should have had more careful editing. There were more than a few grammatical errors and some of the sentence structure was questionable. Otherwise, I highly recommend this story.