The Golden Gate

Author/Guide: Amy Chua

Why a Booktrail?

1944: California buffeted by the turbulent crosswinds of a world at war

ISBN: 978-1838959487
Genre: Historical, Inspired by true events

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

Berkeley, California 1944: A former presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms at the opulent Claremont Hotel. A rich industrialist, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of adversaries. But Detective Al Sullivan’s investigation brings up the spectre of another tragedy at the Claremont ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the wealthy and influential Bainbridge family. Some say she haunts the Claremont still.

The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: 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 Chinese first lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek – Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion.

Locations

Reset

Travel Guide

Berkeley California

Wartime California and the era of shipbuilding in San Francisco is nicely evoked and it’s a detailed picture you see here. The Clairmont Hotel and the Palace hotel are real and have their own histories of mystery.

The author says:

“In 1930s San Francisco, the poor were staving on the street while the rich spent like there was no tomorrow. Bigotry was shameless and rampant, with Mexicans forcibly ‘repatriated’ by the hundreds of thousands, the Chinese Exclusion Act still in place, and hostile derision openly directed at ‘Okis’, a term then referring to poor white migrants from the Dust Bowl. In 1940s came the Japanese internment, when full-fledged American citizens were literally caged off. For the first time, Blacks came to the Bay Area in significant numbers, pouring in from the American South in search of jobs, only to find themselves subjected to vicious prejudice.”