The Golden Gate: A Novel

The Golden Gate (2023) is a historical thriller and work of detective noir by Amy Chua. A Yale Law School professor and the best-selling author of several nonfiction works that analyze cultural and group dynamics, Chua’s best-known work is her 2011 memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She made her fiction debut with this novel, which was a finalist for the Edgar Award. 

Drawing heavily on the history of the San Francisco Bay Area during World War II, the narrative blends hardboiled detective fiction with a gothic family saga. Set in 1944, the novel follows Al Sullivan, a mixed-race police detective, as he investigates the murder of a presidential candidate at the upscale Claremont Hotel. The case becomes entangled with the victim’s connection to a wealthy Berkeley family and a mysterious death that occurred at the same hotel 14 years earlier. The novel explores themes of The Social and Psychological Costs of Racial Passing, The Unreliability of History and Memory, and Inherited Trauma and the Pathology of Female Pain.

This guide refers to the 2024 Minotaur Books trade paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, child death, death by suicide, animal death, graphic violence, child sexual abuse, child abuse, physical abuse, racism, religious discrimination, antigay bias, gender discrimination, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and addiction.

Plot Summary

The story opens in March 1944 with the deposition of Mrs. Genevieve Bainbridge, the matriarch of a wealthy family in San Francisco’s Bay Area. District Attorney (DA) Diarmuid Doogan pressures her to identify which of her three granddaughters murdered a prominent political figure, Walter Wilkinson, and threatens to prosecute all three as coconspirators if she refuses. Mrs. Bainbridge resists, insisting on providing historical context for the family’s actions.

A flashback to 1930 recounts the death of Mrs. Bainbridge’s seven-year-old granddaughter Iris Stafford. While playing hide-and-seek at the Claremont Hotel, Iris’s six-year-old sister, Isabella, finds Iris dead at the bottom of a laundry chute, her neck broken. The tragedy shatters the family. Isabella becomes mute for months and experiences psychological trauma, while her mother, Sadie, develops an alcohol addiction and a mental illness, leading to her commitment to a psychiatric hospital.

The narrative shifts to the main timeline in 1944, narrated by Berkeley Police Detective Al Sullivan, a mixed-race officer navigating issues of class and race in the Bay Area. While Sullivan is at the Claremont Hotel on other business, there is an attempt on the life of Wilkinson, a presidential candidate. Though shots are fired in Wilkinson’s room, he is unharmed and claims that a communist assailant attacked him. Later that night, after being moved to a new room on Sullivan’s orders, Wilkinson returns to his original room and is later found dead. He has been shot in the head, his pants are pulled down, and his mouth is stuffed with hotel detritus. While searching the room for evidence, the police find an antique Dy-Dee doll with a melted foot.

Sullivan’s investigation begins. The autopsy reveals that Wilkinson was shot with a .38 caliber weapon, and a jade seal with Chinese calligraphy is found in his throat. The forensics lab determines that the doll is a rare 1930 model and has a groove carved into its arm that corresponds to pre-existing bruises on Iris’s body. A hotel maid, Juanita Juárez, tells Sullivan that she saw one of the Bainbridge granddaughters, a beautiful blonde, entering Wilkinson’s room with him around midnight, but she cannot identify which one. Sullivan questions the three granddaughters, cousins Nicole and Cassie Bainbridge and Isabella, who provide a coordinated alibi: They say that they were all at the family’s country house in Sonoma that night. Sullivan finds their story suspicious, particularly after Cassie behaves evasively and abandons him at the country house when he tries to question her.

The narrative is interwoven with excerpts from Mrs. Bainbridge’s written testimonial, which she prepares for the DA. She reveals family secrets, including Sadie’s long-standing mental illness and her past affair with Wilkinson, who was Iris’s biological father. A flashback to the 1937 Golden Gate Bridge opening further illustrates the cousins’ complex childhoods since their parents were not attentive to their needs, and Isabella, in particular, experienced continued psychological struggles stemming from Iris’s death.

The investigation expands into multiple threads. Isabella, who is a reporter, tips Sullivan off to a rumored affair between Wilkinson and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the first lady of China, who is living in Berkeley. The jade seal is confirmed to be an official Chinese government artifact. Sullivan then discovers the body of Jane Chao, a former servant of Madame Chiang, who has been murdered with a hatchet. The head of a local tong, Eddie Gong, suggests that Chinese political factions are involved. Simultaneously, Sullivan learns that the Claremont’s laundry staff consists of Japanese Americans hiding from internment; they were trying to pass as Chinese, and all of them were hired with Cassie’s help.

Sullivan confronts Juanita, who recants her initial story. She now claims that she saw a Bainbridge girl, whom she still cannot identify, coming out of Wilkinson’s room after the murder—not entering it, as she previously stated—upset and with blood on her yellow skirt. Meanwhile, based on a false confession from Nicole’s communist-affiliated friends, Eliana Halikias and Sal Ibarra, DA Doogan has Nicole arrested for the murder. However, Sullivan proves that their story was fabricated out of jealousy, and Nicole is released. Suspicion then shifts to Cassie, who is arrested alongside Yuko Sasaki, a Japanese woman she was helping. Doogan claims that Yuko is a Japanese sympathizer who committed the murder because Wilkinson supported the internment of Japanese Americans. However, the Bainbridge family lawyer produces a doctor as a witness, and he provides a rock-solid alibi for them; at the time of the murder, the doctor was performing an emergency appendectomy on Yuko at her San Francisco clinic, with both Cassie and Nicole present.

With her cousins cleared, suspicion falls entirely on Isabella. Sullivan finds a note from Wilkinson, inviting Isabella to his room at midnight on the night of the murder. When Sullivan confronts Isabella about this, she admits that she went to the room but found Wilkinson already dead. She reveals that Wilkinson was her biological father as well, not just Iris’s. 

In the final stages of the investigation, Sadie emerges as the primary murder suspect. Sullivan finds the murder weapon in the house she shares with Isabella, but Isabella’s fingerprints get on it when she hands it to him. Believing that Isabella is innocent and wrestling with his own romantic feelings for her, Sullivan destroys the fingerprint evidence. Then, Madame Chiang provides him with a threatening letter addressed to Wilkinson, seemingly from Isabella, which leads to her arrest. Isabella refuses to speak about her role in the crime, but while in custody, she has a breakthrough and recalls a hooded figure following Iris to the laundry chute. She realizes that it was her grandmother under the hood.

To secure a confession and free Isabella, Sullivan lies to Mrs. Bainbridge, telling her that a graphologist has confirmed that the threatening letter is in Isabella’s handwriting. Believing that Isabella’s conviction is certain, Mrs. Bainbridge dies by suicide, leaving her full confession. She details her own brief, past affair with Wilkinson and her subsequent discovery that he was pursuing not only her daughter, Sadie, but also her granddaughter Isabella. To protect Isabella, Mrs. Bainbridge forged a threatening letter in Isabella’s handwriting and, when that failed to deter him, disguised herself in a monk’s cassock, went to the Claremont, and shot him. She staged the scene to humiliate him and implicate Madame Chiang, and she hid the murder weapon at the Stafford house as a contingency. Her note also mentions that she was present on the day that Iris died at the Claremont; disguised in her monk’s cassock, she watched as Sadie and Wilkinson argued and Iris, unattended, climbed into the laundry chute.

In the aftermath, Isabella is released. Sullivan helps Yuko and a group of other Japanese refugees escape to a safe farm in Nevada. After his niece Miriam Milsap’s mother abandons her, Sullivan pays off her mother’s gambling debt and formally adopts her. Isabella, grateful, arranges for Miriam to attend a prestigious boarding school on a full scholarship. The case is officially closed, with Doogan spinning the outcome as a victory exposing the moral decay of the upper class.