The Golden Gate
Although she is the author of three nonfiction works, it is difficult to believe that this is Amy Chua’s fiction debut since it is such an extremely well-crafted murder/mystery in the Agatha Christie tradition. It is also a ‘police procedural’, in that the principal investigator, Al Sullivan, is a detective of the San Francisco police.
The story has all the right elements: a high-profile victim (a Presidential candidate), a cast of colourful suspects drawn from all levels of society, a fiendishly complicated plot which casts each suspect in turn as the culprit only to surprise us all with a dramatic denouement, an investigator with depth of character and a complex private life, and a realistic setting: San Francisco in 1944, at the height of the wartime ship-building boom and the anti-Japanese paranoia. If there is any fault, it is that Chua periodically treats us to two or three pages of California history, which I found interesting but is undeniably info-dumping.
It is undoubtedly a page turner. Please give us more, Amy Chua.
