Tag: san Francisco

City Lights by Claire M. Johnson (Historical Mystery)

Book two of Johnson’s “Fog City Noir” series, starring the undauntable Maggie Laurent — the hardboiled secretary for a hardboiled detective who has (likely permanently) left San Francisco for cooler climes allowing her to try to make it on her own (read episode one — Fog City — for the full skinny). Starting from a few seemingly small requests, Maggie ends up in the middle of the historic Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) often violent organizing efforts crossed with some nasty business practices and (of course) crooked politicians. Great dialog, plenty of action, a strong female lead who learns to box and shoot a gun, to the great distress of her “loving” family, and enough reflection on her part to keep me happy. Plenty of good characters — some over the top, like Dickie who has got to be based on Truman Capote with plenty of endearing but wicked mannerisms, but all interesting and likable.

A fun read and I look forward to the next in the series.

Thank you to Level Best Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on July 15th, 2025.

Fog City by Claire M Johnson (Historical Mystery)

I loved this first episode of a new crime noir series starring a hard boiled detective’s equally hard boiled secretary who takes over for her boss when he goes on an extended bender. 1930s San Francisco where a wealthy elite doesn’t even give a nod to Prohibition, and absolutely everyone seems to be running their own con. A banker’s (second) wife comes to the agency to ask for help in locating her errant stepson. In no time we’re whirling about in opium dens, speakeasies, fancy restaurants, and police cells trying to get to the bottom of a widely expanding set of dead bodies. I loved the supporting cast (many of whom I look forward to meeting again in future books) — all fully fleshed out, non dull, people with distinct and intriguing personalities, and I loved that there were plenty of opportunities for philosophical discussions on evil vs “regular” sin and morality in general. The style (and environs) reminded me of Dashiell Hammett at his best — with the clever substitution of the substituting secretary. Plenty of great male characters, by the way, and full acceptance of what women were able (allowed) to do at the time. I always like stories where some group has difficulty getting things done because of social conventions but they get on and do it anyway without bothering to whine about it 🙂
A great surprise read for me!

Thank you to Level Best Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on July 30th, 2024

The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 4/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4/5

Two determined women, a wealthy, charming, but deeply dangerous man, and a precipitous event come together in this propulsive novel by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang. I’ve read most of Quinn’s novels; I’m planning to read my first Chang shortly because it looks fascinating!

Gemma Garland comes to San Francisco to meet up with the Met traveling group to join the chorus when a current singer chooses to leave. Garland is a gorgeous soprano who is prevented from singing leading roles due to debilitating migraines she can’t control. Feng Suling is a (very) talented seamstress who is desperate to escape the arranged marriage her uncle is forcing on her to escape his (massive) gambling debts after her parents died. Mr. Thornton — a wealthy and ambitious patron of the arts — is in a position to help them both and yet… he is not necessarily what he seems to be. It is early April in 1906 and the infamous San Francisco earthquake is less than two weeks away.

Good writing encompassing plenty of richly detailed history. Real characters such as Enrico Caruso (famous tenor — I’m guessing most of you know this!), Martin Beck (the founder of the Orpheum theater), and Alice Eastwood (the curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences) are inserted into the plot without betraying their actual character or actions (at least not too much). Fascinating details about Asian art, including the Phoenix Crown (real and stunning), an exquisite Dragon Robe, and multiple object d’art are included — both in description and in terms of how they are made. A full description of Chinatown and the various laws, policies, and practices around Chinese immigrants at the time is provided with depth and nuance.

A powerful narrative with a real punch. Plenty of opportunity to perch on the edge of your seat and bite a nail or two.

Thank you to William Morrow Paperbacks and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 13th, 2024.

At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier (Historical Fiction — Audio Book)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4.5/5

This is historical fiction at its best. Not a recounting of precipitous events, but the every day details and inner drives of a family — in this case a family trying to eke a living from an orchard / farm in the Black Swamp of Ohio. The narrative spans the late 1830s to 1856 bouncing around between times and four perspectives: James — with a love of apples and his orchard that borders on obsession; his wife Sadie — overwhelmed by the swamp, stubborn as a mule, and a mean drunk; their youngest son (of 10 children) Robert who is somewhat different from the rest; and their daughter Martha, timid, obedient, and fragile.

I listened to this as an audio book and the four voices were astonishingly good. I took a look at a physical book and think I would have loved reading the book just as much, but the audio definitely added a lot to the experience.

I loved the depictions of real people and events. There is just enough description of apple growing (told from James’ perspective) to be engrossing, but never tedious. Real historical characters pop up with intriguing detail: John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) visits the farm regularly to supply apple seedlings and God Talk; William Lobb (a collector for Veitch Nurseries of Exeter who was rapidly importing all of the “new” plant life found in North America) introduces Robert to the art of plant collecting. Settings from Sacramento gold mining to Ohio camp meetings to new tourist attractions in the newly discovered Sequoia grove populate the story. I was most impressed by the array of survival tactics needed in this hugely different world. No modern sensibilities poked their noses into the narrative, and it occurred to me multiple times how hard a real hard life for some people was. It was survival in a time with little stability and absolutely no backup. Instead there was just mud, swamp fever, real hunger, and ever present danger. Not sure how many of us today would make it past our 20s.

I loved the interior worlds of the four “voices.” They made sense, even when they did things that I thought were wrong, or stupid. Their worldview was coherent and their actions made absolute sense within those worldviews. This is an extremely hard trick to pull off. Stellar writing all around — just the right amount of description — distilling thoughts / actions / scenery into their essence without a lot of extraneous verbiage — great dialog, and fully cohesive characters that are a product of the place and time.
One of my top reads of the year.

The Trackers by Charles Frazier (Literary Historical Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 4.5/5 Plot: 4/5

Works Progress Administration (WPA) painter, Val Welch, heads West for an enviable New Deal commission in small town Dawes, Wyoming. His remit: to paint a mural in the town Post Office that represents the region. His chosen topic: “The Energy of America or the natural and human history of this place.” He is offered free lodgings at the ranch of the wealthy John Long and his wife, Eve, a former honky tonk singer with her own troubled past. Faro, a rather iconic tough cowboy (and complete horse whisperer) is one of those mysterious characters who draws you in against your conscious inclination.

When Eve runs off, Val takes a break from painting to moonlight as a tracker, criss-crossing the Depression riddled country in search of her. It’s a rich narrative, teeming with individual stories and told from a young (and somewhat embittered) painter’s eye. His search takes him from Wyoming to Seattle to San Francisco to Florida — each location suffering from the Depression in its own Hellish way. Each character — from the four leads to the many supporting — is both an individual and an obvious product of his or her history in these troubled times. We are treated to Val’s narrative commentary on the way, ranging from his own hopes and desires to his surprises to his inner rantings on subjects of government, greed, and some (previously unknown to me) dispiriting Supreme Court Decisions.

The deep dives (scattered throughout the story) on how the mural was conceived and executed were engrossing. It was to be done in “roughly the ancient way” and I enjoyed learning about how to make, tint, and use tempera paint, build scaffolding, and simply look at the world in a different (artistic) way.


The story is bold, expansive, and yet also intricately detailed. Excellent writing — see some of my favorite quotes below. I liked the balance between action and introspection, and I loved the description of the physical surroundings integrated with internal landscape of Val’s thoughts.

Highly recommended.

Some great quotes:
“Looking now, the missing element — and it was down in a deep crater — was the violence of the West. Not so much the physical geography, but the violence inherent in the concept of the West, the politically and culturally and religiously ordained rapacity smearing blood all over the fresh beauty.”

“Traveling the country, town by town, I felt a heady drift of grief and sometimes a breakthrough of optimism from the long Depression.”

“So the mural’s main argument, however it was shaped, was that this particular place held importance and was not forgotten after all.”

“The look seemed inhuman until I realized that just because I might never have felt or thought whatever passed through Faro’s mind and body in that flicker of time did not mean it wasn’t human.”

“Which struck me, a childless man with the first number in his age still two, as a better position on childrearing if you meant it metaphorically and if the floor wasn’t rock-hard hexagonal tile laid over a slab of concrete.”

“The higher the elevation, the more I felt like I was being rendered transparent by X-rays or gamma rays or whatever.”

“After all, the ultimate expression of Capitalism is not democracy. It’s a dictatorship not of individual men but of corporations with interchangeable leaders. I wasn’t sure if the Depression was straining the structural limits of our Constitution or simply revealing that its fundamental idea were faulty.”

“After Florida — a state equivalent to a hotel towel from somebody else’s bath flung sopping across your face — Wyoming felt clean and brittle, the light fragile as a flake of mica, the high air rare enough to be measured in the lungs and appreciated in its thinness, it’s lack of substance.”

Thank you to Ecco and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 11th, 2023

A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King (Literary Mystery)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 4/5 Plot: 5/5

The first in the Kate Martinelli mystery series (for which she won an Edgar), and I’m completely hooked! Completely bizarre, twisted plot, fully developed characters and tight writing. Writing quality is right up there with Louise Penny (which I don’t say a lot) — feels more like literary fiction embedding an intriguing mystery rather than a (boring) cozy or a mystery that is all plot/action filled with stock characters.

A serial killer has begun murdering young girls, depositing them all on a road in the midst of an odd colony outside of San Francisco. A seasoned cop and a newly promoted Detective (Kate) have been assigned the case with no real leads — and then they find out that one of the colony residents was associated with a similar crime many years before …

In the Time of our History by Susanne Pari (Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 5/5

I loved this character and culture driven drama about an extended Iranian American family post the 1979 Islamic revolution. The characters have depth and nuance that take them far beyond the obvious stereotypes that could describe each of them: the family patriarch, the obedient wife, the rebellious daughter, the faithful family retainer. The depictions are honest — no clear heroes or victims, no melodramatic righteous rage — just people finding their way while blending an inherited traditional culture with the modern practices of their new home.

The language is powerful but never manipulative, and the stories feel real. Moral dilemmas — with no clearly correct solutions — abound, and the frank and straightforward discussions of some of them — perceived racism, roles for women, infidelity, etc. — are captivating. I loved the way immigrants were depicted as individuals, each with their own backstory, set of initial circumstances, and eventual integration paths — none following the same script. Also — one of the best first lines I’ve read in a long while.

Set in the late 1990s and taking place in New Jersey and San Francisco. Great for fans of “Of a Place For Us” by Fatima Farheen Mirza. Highly recommended!

Quotes:

“Espresso and anxiety — well behaved on their own, rambunctious as urchins together.”

“Mitra, on the other hand, had once told a flirtatious union official that if he didn’t smell like a sewer in non ninety-degreee weather, she might consider thanking him for staring blatantly at her breasts. Another time, Mitra told the mayor’s secretary — a consistently rude person — to call after her PMS was over.”

“Anahita had innately understood that it was a traditional woman’s responsibility to refract unwanted male attention, a concept Mitra once denounced as a direct offshoot of the idea of hejab, invented and perpetuated by men who didn’t want to take responsibility for their own lust.”

“I also had a difficult father. Some people cannot abandon their misery. Mitra studied him. His face was drawn, his mouth pulled down either end. ‘Is that how you justify their behaviour?’ ‘No, it is how I keep from hating them. Hate takes too much energy.’ ”

“This was the dynamic, false though it was on its face. Mitra tried to see Akram the way Julian did. ‘She’s just confused, Mitra. Wouldn’t you be? She’s never known anything different. We have to teach her.’ Mitra hates those lines; they sounded like something from a Kipling story about the civilized enlightening the natives. As if the Western world was devoid of poor, uneducated, and bitter people.”

“Surely someone had reminded her of this fact: that few people escaped the tragedy of senseless death, that suffering had no purpose, no meaning, no justification. But she hadn’t heard, hadn’t listened. Until now. Why now? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She got it.”

“This is what I’m explaining, Shireen. You came to America, and while you were here, Iran moved forward. After the Kennedys invited the Shah and Farah to visit America, the rush to reform was on. Not only did the landscape change — the buildings and roads and modern conveniences — but also the people, the culture. Even the traditional families couldn’t ignore the excitement of it — the opportunities for prosperity, technology, for resistance against Soviet influence.”

“Mitra squinted at the tube of the jetway and spotted her mother between the hulking arms of two businessmen, their suit bags hanging off their shoulders like slaughtered game.”

“Perhaps she’d seen too many TV talk shows where women displayed their mistakes and misfortunes as if they were wares on a blanket at the bazaar. Or perhaps she knew now that so few outcomes in life could be controlled.”

“The mere fact of their abandonment was a stigma, a curse almost, that prevented them from being wanted by anyone. They came from bad stock, from people in such dire straits or lacking such humanity and sense of goodness that they could abandon their own offspring.”

“Those were the days when she didn’t want to have much to do with her parent’s culture, which prized opaque symbolism excessively. The harder a person had to work to discover hidden meanings, the higher its value.”

Thank you to Kensington Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on January 3rd, 2023.

At the Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman (Literary Fiction)

Thank you to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on January 19th, 2021.

Writing: 3.5/5 Plot: 3/5 Characters: 3/5
A very readable book about Maddy — a 20-year old homeless girl in San Francisco who unwittingly witnesses the tail end of the murder of a homeless boy and gets tangled up with the victim’s parents and general ineffectiveness of the judicial system.

The writing is good and it does thoroughly depict at least one homeless person’s life in San Francisco — the utter tedium of hanging around doing little but scamming for money or getting high all day, sleeping in the park but waking at 4:00 am to avoid the cops, heading to the shelter for showers and food — rinse, repeat. While the book was clearly supposed to trigger a feeling of empathy, pity, and a desire for more social programs to “help,” it really did the opposite for me. Maddy and her friends were given so many opportunities to live a different life: in addition to all the free food, showers, medical care, etc. they got from the shelter and free clinics, they were constantly offered entrance into all kinds of programs to help by a slew of well-meaning social workers. Instead, they spend their days hanging around doing nothing, begging for money to get high, and sitting in the park gathering program pamphlets from do-gooders. Which they didn’t want. Eventually, after watching the young boy bleed out, engaging with the boy’s heartbroken parents, seeing one of her friends almost OD, and having a social worker make the effort to find her in the park every day offering encouragement, more programs, and a round trip bus ticket to find her estranged mother, Maddy begins a journey we hope will be more productive. I was honestly left feeling like maybe all of the money behind these programs could have been better spent elsewhere. I’m completely behind offering people opportunities to get out of a hole — whether of their own making or not — but I’m not enthused about chasing them down repeatedly until they deign to give it a try.

The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 3/5 Plot: 3.5/5 Characters: 4/5

Unusual family drama (with an element of mystery) that takes place before, during, and after the big San Francisco Quake of 1906. Irish immigrant Sophie Whalen answers an ad for a mail order bride. The husband? A handsome widower with a young, motherless, daughter. Things are not as they appear, however, and one morning when her husband is away, a knock on the door changes everything. And then … the big one hits.

Decent writing, likable though somewhat two-dimensional characters, and some interesting surprises in the plot. The best part is the detailed, historically accurate descriptions of San Francisco and the Bay Area (eg San Mateo) during and after the quake.

Thank you to Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on February 2nd, 2021.

Paper Wife by Laila Ibrahim

Thanks to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest opinion. Book to be released on Oct. 30, 2018.
Writing: 3/5 Characters: 4.5/5 Plot: 4/5

A gripping, and ultimately uplifting, tale highlighting a piece of American immigrant history. The date is 1923 and Mei Ling is an 18-year old girl in Guangdong Province whose family fortune has suffered “the triple devastation of war, famine, and disease.” With little warning, she finds herself a “paper wife” — married to a stranger (and mother to a two-year old named Bo) under the false name of his recently deceased wife in order to enter America. Her true identity is buried under a second layer — her elder sister was the intended bride, but a last minute illness forced the substitution. Mei Ling must keep this quiet as her husband is expecting a timid Rabbit wife and is instead receiving a fierce Dragon.

The story follows Mei Ling through her wedding, the trip in steerage to San Francisco, her new family, including a six-year old orphan named Siew whom she meets on the boat, and immigration through Angel Island. Beautiful and detailed descriptions of San Francisco and Oakland Chinatowns, the people she meets, the lives they lead, and the way different people try to succeed in the new country. I love that each of the characters (even the unpleasant ones) has real depth — the author did not resort to stereotypes in this fictionalized account of a Chinese immigrant experience. The story takes some surprising turns as Mei Ling the Dragon takes steps to maintain harmony and protect her family.

As a way of setting the context, the book’s epigraph comprises a single disturbing quote from then President Rutherford B. Hayes: “I am satisfied the present Chinese labor invasion (it is not in any proper sense immigration — women and children do not come) is pernicious and should be discouraged. Our experience in dealing with the weaker races — the negroes and the Indians, for example — is not encouraging.” Ugh.