THE GOLDEN GATE is about how not-golden the reality of 1944 California was

THE GOLDEN GATE
AMY CHUA
Minotaur Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Amy Chua's debut novel, The Golden Gate, is a sweeping, evocative, and compelling historical thriller that paints a vibrant portrait of a California buffeted by the turbulent crosswinds of a world at war and a society about to undergo massive change.

In Berkeley, California, in 1944, Homicide Detective Al Sullivan has just left the swanky Claremont Hotel after a drink in the bar when a presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms upstairs. A rich industrialist with enemies among the anarchist factions on the far left, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of groups. But strangely, Sullivan’s investigation brings up the specter of another tragedy at the Claremont, ten years the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the Bainbridge family, one of the wealthiest in all of San Francisco. Some say she haunts the Claremont still.

The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now Iris’s sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth―not the powerful influence of Bainbridges’ grandmother, or the political aspirations of Berkeley’s district attorney, or the interest of China's First Lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in his findings―Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion.

Chua’s page-turning debut brings to life a historical era rife with turbulent social forces and groundbreaking forensic advances, when race and class defined the very essence of power, sex, and justice, and introduces a fascinating character in Detective Sullivan, a mixed race former Army officer who is still reckoning with his own history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Let's deal with the baggage first: Yale Law professor; defender of indefensible scum Brett Kavanaugh; author of polarizing memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011, and Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, an ambitious, polarizing take on why cultural identity must be considered in all political calculus, in 2018. She challenges her readers in her non-fiction, and not all y'all like that.

Ready to set all that baggage down now? Okay, let's go.

California has a long history of racist nastiness. There are strands of that history in this historical mystery. The author's own racialized identity gives her, IMnever-remotelyHO, the insight and standing to imagine the life of a half-Latino, half-Irish (believe it or not, Irishness was in that time also a looked-down-on ethnic identity) talented observer with a strong thirst for Justice to be Done no matter how that end ends up looking. Unusually for a guy from his not-WASP background, Al Sullivan (took mom's name to avoid the most easily deployed prejudice) got into and graduated from UC-Berkeley, which is how he came to the attention of the factual-but-used-fictionally police chief and "father of modern policing" August Vollmer, thus in a position to investigate this high-profile case.

Now that the detective's in front of your mental eyes, let's talk about the mystery. A polarizing politico is murdered at Berkeley's fancy hotel, the Claremont. Super-easy to come up with suspects since he was not nice to much of anyone, as well as rumored to have been intimately involved with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, then resident in Berkeley. Virulently anti-Japanese and fully on board with Executive Order 9066, to boot. There are links in all of these strands to people present in the Claremont that night, giving them motives for killing the scumbag (another mystery wherein the police just shoulda shrugged when he was found shot and said "whatcha gonna duuu" TBH). What Al discovers as he searches for the real answers is that even people officially on his side, like the DA, are ready to bury truth for expediency, and shed-loads of people whose own paths have twists and turns they want to keep hidden are also on every side. In the end, there are a lot of names and identities to keep track of, and the pace is slightly slackened by the multiplicity of strands interweaving to make a net that can only catch a certain party. These are issues common to new-to-police-procedural writers. They aren't fatal flaws, either. The author's note at the end of the book leaves little doubt about her abilities as a researcher and as a fiction writer. She details the sources and inspirations for the fictionalized people, explains her choices well, and makes a darn good case that this crime could have been solved in just this way in reality.

What kept me reading was the sense that the real world of 1944. with all its bloody horrors, its dirty deals done to serve a "greater good," its regular people struggling with their life-stuff and with the sheer, pervasive nightmare of prejudice unmuted, was just like this.

That is one of the highest compliments I can pay a writer: I believe you.