I don't typically read thrillers, but I absolutely loved this one! Wonderfully paced, Sullivan keeps the reader guessing all the while delving into pertinent political issues. An author to look out for!

Amy Chua's The Golden Gate was wonderfully written. Chua intertwined so many different storylines and details masterfully. I felt like there was a plot for everyone! There's a murder mystery and detective investigative work. There's an uncle struggling with what to do with his niece when his sister is deep in her drug addiction. There's a wealthy family. There's a family in poverty. There are deposition transcripts and trial action. There are immigrants doing their best to thrive in a system built to put them at a disadvantage. There's historical drama around the racist practices of Japanese confinement camps during WW2. There's imagery of opening day on the Golden Gate Bridge. This book has it all!


Thank you to St. Martin's Press for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my review.

The more she learned about the ‘30s-and-’40s era of her California-based novel, "The Golden Gate," author Amy Chua tells us in an afterword, the more she was struck by the "stark parallels" between America today and the Bay Area in the time of the Great Depression and World War II. Bigotry was rampant and shameless back then, as now, she notes, and the poor, also like now, starved on the streets while the rich spent like there was no tomorrow – plus ca change, as the French say.
But more than being very much relevant to our own times, her book is a meticulously crafted recreation of a particular time and place, where there really was a Claremont Hotel, which features prominently enough in her novel to be almost a character in its own right. And the house where Chua’s parents resided, she tells us in the afterword, was also lived in for a time, as in the novel, by the First Lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who for whatever reason was in the Berkeley area in the '30s, when she was rumored to have had an affair with presidential contender Wendell Wilkie, whose initials match those of a prominent figure in Chua's novel, Walter Wilkinson. And, furthering the parallels, Wilkinson is depicted as a presidential contender who also is said to have had an affair with the Chinese Madame.
But the parallels end there, with the fictional Wilkinson, unlike the real-life Wilkie, being killed at the Claremont in a shooting which the responding detective learns is apparently tied to the death of a small girl who fell down a laundry chute at the Claremont some years before and whose ghost is even said to still be haunting the hotel.
An intriguing setup, to be sure, which certainly kept me reading, even though mysteries aren’t usually my cup of tea. Not that I can’t get as caught up in a good mystery as much as the next person, I cut my reading teeth, after all, on Sherlock Holmes and the Hardy Boys, but I’ve come over the years to be put off by the artifice or contrivance of mysteries, with Chua's novel being no exception. For instance, the actual murder of Wilkinson follows an earlier incident just hours before at the hotel when someone seemingly attempted to shoot him but missed, with the bullet ending up in the wall. Even so, a very-much-alive Wilkinson tells the responding detective that he's been murdered, something which actually comes to pass a short time later, when the detective is called back to the scene to find Wilkinson very much dead this time, with his pants pulled down and his mouth stuffed with sundry items.
An engrossing mystery, as I say, even if I found the solution somewhat unsatisfying and even, as with so many other mysteries I’ve read, somewhat confusing. I’m still scratching my head, for instance, as to exactly why Wilkinson says what he does after the first shooting incident, and the explanation for those objects stuffed in his mouth seemed unsatisfying and even something of a red herring.
Still, even with the novel's implausibilities in the way of most mysteries, the book was engrossing enough to keep me reading, even if I found myself more intrigued with the non-mystery aspects of the novel, including a particularly fascinating section for me on California's sequoias, about which I learned they shed needles onto their branches to such an extent that whole ecosystems are created hundreds of feet off the ground. Plus there's fascinating detail in the book about the Mexican Repatriation as well as the internment of American Japanese, both of which were more interesting to me than the actual mystery.
Still, as I've said, the gumshoe element held my attention well enough, especially with its depiction of an endearing relationship between the cop and his young niece, who has been fobbed off on him by his irresponsible half-sister and has him ruminating on the responsibility of one person for another – the sort of psychological probing I’d have liked to have seen more of. But there’s still a good deal about the relationship, which, along with the book's central mystery and historical detail, made for a compelling read.

The Golden Gate by Amy Chua

This one was not for me. I am positive that my friends and other reviewers will love it, but too much information was given to be as descriptive as possible but in a lot of areas the author over does it. The POV is just a little to quirky and un appealing to me. I DNf at after about 30%

The name Amy Chua was familiar to me and I couldn’t recall why - until I picked up this book and read the about the author - she’s known as being the “Tiger Mom.” What I expected from “The Golden Gate,” her debut novel, was a well researched book about the East Bay [Oakland, Berkeley] area of San Francisco Bay. This book was well researched. This book is also packed with a lot of information - sometimes too much regarding sub-plots. It took me a while to get into this book - including how the older woman’s story and the young girl’s story tied into the main story, but over time it became obvious how everything fit together. This is a complicated story - with lots of things woven together against a political background. I think this book needed to flow more evenly - at times I felt taken out of the story so something historical could be explained. Also, this has a label of being a thriller - mystery, yes. Thriller? I didn’t feel this book should have that label. Overall, I think if you want to know more about the politics and history of the California Bay Area during the 1940s, this might be a book to pick up.

A wartime presidential candidate is killed in his hotel room, and the investigation leads to every corner of the city…and maybe beyond.

Wealthy businessman and presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson is staying in an elegant hotel in Berkeley, CA. The year is 1944, and the country is in turmoil. In the wake of Pearl Harbor Japanese Americans have been sent to internment camps due to fears of enemy sympathizers amongst them. A battle for power in China also has ties to the area as Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, wife of the Chinese leader, is living in a house in the Berkeley hills while her husband seeks to quell the challenge at home of communist Mao Tse-tung. Leftist politics are at play in Berkeley too; concerns over racial inequalities and unfair labor practices, lead angry workers and idealistic college students to join forces to elicit societal change. So, when someone shoots at Wilkinson in his hotel room, there is no shortage of potential suspects. The shot did not hit its intended target, and hotel staff quickly approach Detective Al Sullivan, who happens to be in the hotel bar, to address the situation. Sullivan arranges for Wilkinson to be quietly moved to a different room in the hotel, and leaves a policeman to guard him. Inexplicably Wilkinson returns to his original room later that night and this time his luck runs out. He is found dead, with his pants pulled down and all manner of things crammed down his throat. Sullivan is put in charge of the investigation, and soon finds that witness statements are suspect, clues left at the scene may not be red herrings, and he is going to make a lot of people very unhappy as he works to find out who killed Wilkinson and why. Are there Japanese spies hiding amongst the hotel staff? Are there people working to advance Chinese goals, at either the direction of Chiang Kai-Shek or Mao? And why do members of the wealthy socially prominent and politically influential .Bainbridge family keep popping up? Does the tragic death of a Bainbridge granddaughter at this very hotel years ago play into what has happened now? Sullivan has a very difficult situation, and even as he deals with challenges in his personal life and an uncomfortable attraction to one of the main suspects, he must deal with pressure from his chief, who doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers, and the DA, who sees the case as a way to advance his own political aspirations. Sullivan may be risking everything to get to the truth.
Author Amy Chua has created a fascinating historical mystery in The Golden Gate. In addition to a plot full of twists and turns, when no one is above suspicion and everyone seems to be hiding secrets and telling lies, I found an amazing amount of facts about what was happening in Berkeley CA at that time in history. For example, I knew of the internment of Japanese Americans, but had never heard of the forcible mass “repatriation” of Mexican Americans years earlier.. In Al Sullivan, we have a fascinating protagonist. His mother was white, his father both Mexican and Jewish, and even after his father’s removal from the family he rose above his impoverished beginnings to go to college, serve in the Army and, under the tutelage of the famed August Vollmer, forge a career in the Berkeley police force. To do so, he chose to stop using his Hispanic last name and pass for white. His young niece Miriam, for whom he seems to be increasingly responsible, has darker coloring and does not have the same options, or opportunities, and Sullivan is acutely aware of that divide. I hope that this is but the first in a series of mysteries featuring Al Sullivan, a man uniquely able to bridge the different communities who live in his city as an educated man of mixed race who has done what he had to do to reach this poisition in his life but who has not forgotten who he was nor what people of color must deal with in an unequal world. Readers of Walter Mosely’s Easy Rawlins series, Barbara Neey’s Blanche mysteries, Michael Connelly, Dorothy B. Hughes, Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy should give this novel a try. Many thanks to NetGalley and Minotaur Books/St Martin;s Press for allowing me access to an advanced reader’s copy of The Golden Gate.

I was pleasantly surprised by this historical thriller set in the Bay area!

It’s a murder mystery set in 1944 and centered around a wealthy family in Berkley, California. Chua highlights the Claremont Hotel and a grandmother, an unreliable narrator, as she learns that one of her three granddaughters is a murderer. This provides the author a chance to unveil the darker side of San Fransisco’s past; the racism and bigotry, the impact of capitalism on the different ethnic and immigrant groups, and the political/societal changes happening at this time.

Chua brilliantly explores family secrets and costly legacies in addition to the pressure people often feel to conform or hide their true identity.

My only frustration:
✔️ There’s A LOT to unpack

I really feel I would benefit from a second reading!

I loved learning about:
✔️ The phenomena of ‘covering’ and ‘code-switching’
✔️ The christening of the Golden Gate Bridge
✔️ The Chinese Exclusion Act
✔️ The Japanese Internment
✔️The Mexican deportations of the 1930s
✔️Bloody Thursday
✔️The Port Chicago Disaster
✔️ The Diablo wind
✔️Labour unrest at the Kaiser shipyards
✔️Madame Chiang Kai-Shek (and her connection to Chua’s family)
✔️August Vollmer (and his forensic pioneering/role as ‘father of modern policing’)
✔️Dr. Margaret ‘Mom’ Chung (and her contributions as the first Chinese American doctor)
✔️Julia Morgan (a trailblazing architect)
✔️Anne Sexton (poet whose work is woven throughout the book)

If you love the Bay area and its history, learning as you read, court cases and/or historical mysteries, this is one book you’ll want to investigate.

I was gifted this copy by St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.

This book is categorized as historical fiction, mystery, and thriller. While I’m not sure about the thriller tag, it is a book that doesn’t seem to know which of the other two it wants to be. The mystery could have been a riveting whodunit about the murder of a charismatic, potential presidential candidate and the many possible suspects but there is so much factual historical background given to the reader in very detailed chunks, it’s hard to keep interested in the crime at hand.

From the author’s note, it is apparent she did considerable reading and research about California history and the racism toward Asians, both Chinese and Japanese. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment of WWII to the politics of China during the time of Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek, there is a great deal to digest. Added to that there are pages devoted to the blind ambition of a DA in search of glory rather than justice, the immoral deportation of immigrants, economic disparities, and the imbalanced power of those with inordinate amounts of privilege, that could be a book in itself. Had this been more seamlessly woven into the mystery at hand, it would have been more readable. As it was, I was taken out of the story too many times.

It is 1944. Detective Al Sullivan has just had a drink at the posh Claremont Hotel when Walter Wilkinson, a presidential candidate (loosely based on Wendell Wilke), is found murdered in one of the hotel rooms. He has any number of enemies but there is also a potential connection to another tragic death that occurred in the hotel ten years earlier. This brings a trio of beautiful, wealthy heiress into suspicion.

Sullivan finds himself in a web of possibilities. The powerful influence of the Bainbridge heiresses’ grandmother, a politically motivated DA, the potential involvement of Mrs. Chiang Kai-Shek and a murder of a Chinese national, and the turbulence of a post-depression San Francisco entering the second world war. The detective himself is also not all he seems. Half Mexican and part Jewish, he passes for white in a mostly white police department. He is smart, educated, and has a different, wider perspective on his hometown. Sullivan is by far the most interesting, best developed character in the book.

It is a complicated story and there are twists and turns along the way but the poor integration of the historical context distracted me whenever things started to heat up. The author, Ms. Chua, has written several nonfiction books, including the international best seller, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I think she needs to pull herself out of the genre she is comfortable with, slide in some pertinent history and focus on the murder mystery at hand next time. I’d look forward to that.

Many thanks to Netgalley and St. Martins Books (Minotaur) for allowing me to read and review this advanced reading copy.

While the setting and time period was interesting to me, there was something missing that didn't grab me. I DNF'ed around 25%. Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy.

This is not my usual genre, but I was sucked in from the first chapter. I can't believe this is the author's first novel, it is so well developed and easy to follow/read.

I wanted to read for the historical fiction aspect, and the fact that it's set in San Francisco. This book delivered big time in both areas. The author painted a great picture of the Bay Area in the 40's.

The mystery aspect of this book kept me guessing and was well developed.

Highly recommend!!!

The Golden Gate is a fictional story of the truth behind several deaths, one that occurred decades before the events of the story and others that are in the story’s present. The story is told mostly through the eyes of a detective investigating the case, with a few chapters being the statement of a woman being interviewed, which gives a different perspective.

I liked that the solution to the mystery wasn’t something overly obvious, but at the same time wasn’t something so wild it was unrealistic. It was interesting to read a story set in this time period, and I appreciated that the author didn’t try to gloss over problematic and racist attitudes of the time period. Overall, an interesting investigative mystery!

A great historical fiction/murder mystery.
I loved the characters, all well developed and easy to follow. The mystery had a slow build to it, but it did get a little lost at times with all the history. I thought the backstories were a little over done at times. But overall a book worth reading.
I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

The Golden Gate is a historical fiction mystery set in San Francisco and with a lens on the classism and racism during the 1940s. It is a tale with a twist at each corner and characters whose ulterior motives seem ever shifting.

I found myself drawn in by the main character, Al, and his personal and professional lives. His history is complex and having it slowly revealed made his current decisions understandable. His niece, Mariam, caught my heart. She has a smaller role in the story but her character shone and I was rooting for her to find her way.

As there are multiple turns within the mystery and with differing characters you have to be on alert for all the pieces of the story. I was fascinated by the history of the time and how so many elements could speak to today’s current climate within the United States. We may believe we have come far but when you look back it makes you reflect on how limited it has been.

This was a well done mystery that will have you pondering long after you finish it.

Historical fiction in the context of a twisty who-dunnit! Every character is so well developed and the relationships between them are complex, interesting, and totally believable. The author's acknowledgements at the end provide insight into her selections/deviations from history and provide an exceptional list of resources. While some may find the historical references excessive, I found them quite interesting and vital to the plot. Keeping Amy Chua on my list for her next effort.

Hard-boiled and cynical detective intermingles with both the rich and powerful elite of Nob Hill, along with the people on the fringes of society in 1940s San Francisco. If this sounds like a story written by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, you wouldn’t be surprised. If I told you that this is the first novel by Amy Chua of the Tiger Mom fame, you might be shocked! Chua has written a literate, historical mystery with fascinating facts about the San Francisco locale (the Port Chicago disaster is particularly horrifying and mind-boggling). Besides having written one heck of an intriguing murder mystery, she deftly interweaves social issues seamlessly into the narrative. The richly drawn characters encounter various forms of class struggles, prejudice, racial injustice, child labor abuses.

The novel focuses on Al Sullivan, a Berkeley homicide detective, who has the unenviable task of solving a complex murder case involving a presidential candidate who has been killed at the luxurious Claremont Hotel. The victim, Walter Wilkinson, had many enemies with multitudinous reasons for desiring his demise. Meanwhile, another misfortune that occurred ten years earlier at the Claremont involving the death of a seven-year-old member of the mega wealthy Bainbridge family might have implications in the murder investigation.

The author has created characters that are complex, fascinating, and develop beautifully as the story progresses. Detective Sullivan has various weaknesses and preconceptions, but overall he’s decent and adheres to certain morals. The other characters are very captivating, such as the Bainbridge family, Sullivan’s niece, and the various suspects who populate the story.

This is an excellent mystery with numerous twists and turns that aren’t far-fetched yet provide for an enjoyable roller coaster ride. The conclusion is satisfying and wraps up most things nicely while still leaving food for thought. Golden Gate is a golden novel and has become my favorite book of 2023.

Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy. I just couldn't get into this book. There was so much extraneous history and information that the storyline seemed secondary. Another review stated that the book was convoluted, but in a good way. For me it's just convoluted.

This historical crime novel is written in a “hard-boiled” noir style, and takes place in Berkeley, California in the 1930s and 1940s (it goes back and forth in time).

The main story is set in 1944 and concerns homicide detective Al Sullivan. (His given name was Alejo Gutierrez, but he anglicized it when he became a cop to be “above the suspicion line.”) The change works well enough on the surface, but inside Al is acutely aware of his background and the sympathies it imparted to him. Nevertheless, he observes that after he changed his name, life got a lot better:

“I don’t know what that says about this country. Or about me. Sometimes I feel guilty - sometimes worse than guilty. But then I tell myself it’s not me, it’s America.”

The 1944 portion begins with the murder of Walter Wilkinson, a politician who had come in second to FDR for president in 1940 and was planning to run against him again. Al was having a drink at the Claremont, then the largest hotel on the West Coast, when he was called up to Wilkinson’s suite. Wilkinson had been killed and there were plenty of suspects.

Three of them happen to be the granddaughters of Mrs. Genevieve Bainbridge - matriarch of one of the oldest blue-blood families in the Bay Area: “Everyone had heard of San Francisco’s “Bainbridge girls,” famous for their supposed good looks.” Ironically, another granddaughter had died in the Claremont in 1930 in a presumed accident when she was aged seven, and she is said to have haunted the property ever since.

Witnesses claimed not only to have seen a Bainbridge granddaughter coming out of Wilkinson’s room the night of the murder, but a Chinese woman as well, and the trail leads to China's First Lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.

She isn’t the only historical persona in these pages. We also learn about August Vollmer, the first police chief of Berkeley, California, and a leading figure in the development of the field of criminal justice in the United States in the early 20th century, and Julia Morgan, the famous architect who built Hearst’s castle in San Simeon. A number of seminal events in the history of the area are also explored, including background on the Golden Gate Bridge; the development (exploitation) of the area after the discovery of first otters, then seals and beavers, then gold; racial politics; Japanese internment; residential redlining; destruction of the redwoods, and much more.

The murder plot is loaded with false leads and red herrings, adding to the suspense.

Evaluation: I enjoyed this novel more for the early history of the Berkeley, California area than for the “crime” aspects of the story. I thought the “hard-boiled” aspects were a little too derivative and obvious. But I loved learning so much about the place and times.

I loved this one and felt it had whispers of the brilliance on Amy Tan . I loved reading about california in history and San Francisco and the awful way we have a continue to treat immigrants.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me review this book

The Golden Gate is historical fiction that I’ve never read before. The history of California, internment camps, racial disparities mixed with a riveting murder mystery. The characters were unique, and the story was hard to put down.

Reading about my country’s history in a place I have no familiarity with is enlightening. This is a fictional story filled with information about the settlement of San Francisco and the many countries who ruled California. Cultural and class prejudices were very predominant during this period. The descriptions of the magnificent Claremont hotel were breathtaking, as were many others. I felt the author did an excellent job capturing authenticity of the era. The story incorporated politics, communism, unions, inequality and social status distinctions.
Not intended as a criticism, a purely personal preference, I’m not a fan of dual timelines. The back and forth between cases and time periods was distracting for me in the beginning of the story. The continuity was occasionally choppy, even abrupt, it became much smoother as the plot developed.
The first person narrative by the detective whose name was inexplicably kept secret for a fourth of the book also annoyed me. I did begin to relate to his character and appreciated his moral compass and perseverance in the murder case. The interpretation and enforcement of the law during this period of history was highly subjective and rife with opportunity for mistakes, apathy and negligence.
The Bainbridge women were conniving, loyal to their secrets, beautiful, mysterious and liars with deep skeletons in the closet. It was impossible to predict the outcome with all the misdirection and plot twists. I enjoyed the suspense from an author I haven’t read before.
A digital advance reader copy of “The Golden Gate” by Amy Chua, St. Martin’s Publishing, was provided to me by NetGalley. These are all my own honest personal thoughts and opinions given voluntarily without any compensation.