Amy Chua: The Golden Gate
This is a first novel from Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and it’s an ambitious and almost overstuffed concoction set in 1944 San Francisco. Peeling away the many, many complicated layers of her story, the essential plot line is this: in 1930, two sisters were playing at the Claremont Hotel while their mother played tennis. One of them dies by plunging down a laundry chute. Fast forward to 1944, and their grandmother is giving a deposition to the DA, who is sure one of her granddaughters (one of them the sister of the dead girl) is guilty of murder, and he doesn’t mind charging them all if he can’t get a straight answer from her.