JOHN DOLL
Kirkus Reviews
Doll presents a historical saga of labor unrest, criminality, and political persuasion. San Jose, California, known as “the Garden City,” is struggling during the Great Depression.
The fruit and vegetable processing industry serves as the area’s main economic driver, but recent wage cuts have cannery workers poised to go on strike.
Best friends Amelia and Victoria work on a cannery assembly line, thanks to Amelia’s well-connected bar-manager father, Angelo Gumina—the second-in-command to mob boss Gaetano Ferrone—who used his influence to secure them summer jobs.
They soon find themselves fired up by activism, attending meetings and demonstrations to protest unfair wages and poor treatment at work.
To evade police after a demonstration turns ugly, the girls seek refuge in the Rosen Department Store, owned by Alexander Rosen; Victoria meets Alexander’s son and heir, Michael, who’s known as “the scion of San Jose,” and their association leads to Michael being kidnapped and held for $40,000 ransom.
The pressure to solve the case increases when Bureau of Investigation agent Louis Cooper gets involved, sue to rumors of mob involvement, and conflicting accounts of what really happened to Michael emerge.
The apparent lack of progress in the case brings things to a fever pitch. Meanwhile, influential real estate magnate Thomas Ripley, who has the ears of both the mayor and governor, has his own agenda that involves obtaining more power, more land,and more money.
Over the course of this intricate tale of politics, corruption, and shifting alliances, Doll delivers a fast-paced work of historical fiction that takes full advantage of its Prohibition-era California setting.
The farming community is effectively shown to be beset by unrest, greed, and scandal, and the shifting plot will keep readers on their toes.
Overall, the work has a cinematic quality, but it’s always firmly grounded in elements of real-life history; as such, it serves as a cautionary tale on how social disparities and anti-immigrant bias can be manipulated to fuel the evil plans of powerful people.
A sweeping tale that offers lessons from the not-so-distant past.
Awards & Accolades:
OUR VERDICT
GET IT
Judge Paul Bernal
Official Historian of the City of San Jose
St. James Park is a fun read for both those who are familiar with California history, and those who love a gripping yarn.
Besides the woes of the Great Depression which shattered all communities in the early 1930s, the city of San Jose had its own particular troubles.
This unrest boiled to the surface, culminating in the historic kidnapping and murder of the wealthiest “Son of San Jose,” young Brookie Hart.
Author John Doll immerses the reader in these momentous dynamics to ponder the fantastical “why and how” of it all.
He takes us on a fictional adventure that joins the precious smell of plum blossoms with the pungent odor of bloody sin.
Doll masterfully reveals what lies just below the surface of every human soul.
Joel Ben Izzy
Storyteller and Author of
The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness
The best historical fiction thrusts the past upward and irrefutably into the present, as a force to be reckoned with.
That’s what John Doll has done in St. James Park, his breakthrough first novel, spinning a tale ripped from San Jose’s history that will forever change our tech-tinged image of Silicon Vally.
Revolving around the events that took place in what today may seem an innocuous park, Doll’s page-turner introduces us to unforgettable characters actin out at the intersection of race, class and the Depression-era economy—all coming together in a story that needs to be told.
That he does, in a narrative that is at once everywhere and noir, I can’t wait for the next book in the trilogy.