Depression-era San Francisco’s Claremont hotel is a wonderful playground for sisters Isabella and Iris Bainbridge Stafford, six and eight years old, respectively, who roam through it while their wealthy mother plays tennis. The luxurious hotel has a seven-story-long spiral slide that guests can use as a fire escape, one that Iris might think she’s entering to play when she fatally plunges down a laundry chute. Years later, tragedy visits the hotel again—many say it’s been cursed all along—when Presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson is found murdered in his room (murdered twice, in fact—the book explains all). Police officer Alejo Gutiérrez, passing as Al Sullivan, is the slightly jaded, but still caring, investigator who must sift through the jumble of rumors, racism against Asian hotel workers and city residents, and secretive behavior by rich characters who think the law doesn’t apply to them in his efforts to discover who killed the politician. This saga—the story has as many twisting corridors as the hotel–allows Chua to dig deep into the privileges and invisible barriers at work in any haves-and-have-nots meeting, with memorable results. Pair this with the information on the treatment of San Francisco’s Chinese citizens in David Quammen’s excellent Spillover for a sobering and enlightening view of that community’s history.
