About Dennis Phinney:
Although he is an engineer with a prodigious knowledge of our water systems, history, particularly
California history, is author Dennis Phinney’s hobby. He writes what he calls “Red Car Noir,”
tales of the dark side of the American dream typically set around Los Angeles in the early 1900’s,
when a veneer of front-page optimism whitewashed the corruption that shattered lives on
boulevards of broken dreams.
About the Book
THE ANAHEIM BEAUTIES VALENCIA QUEEN takes readers back a century, to a time when the country
was recovering from WWI, orange groves dominated southern California, Hollywood was a mecca for
beautiful young women, and the Klan seemed to stand for God, family, country, and the American Way – or
did it?
Human nature is a constant. The need to belong, to be appreciated, to feel recognized drives us, and when
it is missing, we can be easily seduced by people and organizations offering it to us. Taking place in post
WWI southern California, the often riveting, always multilayered story of THE ANAHEIM BEAUTIES
VALENCIA QUEEN is a coming-of-age novel which proves that then, as now, validation rackets existed,
seducing the lonely, the disenfranchised, the insecure, and the self-conscious, providing them with a sense
of fitting in while luring them into behaviors beyond the pale.
Steeped in little-known California history, the story gives us characters whose problems, moral dilemmas,
strengths and weaknesses are as relevant today as they were in 1924. Yesterday meets today in this
provocative coming-of-age historical novel.
About The Cigarette Girl on the Tango (Pub Date July 27, 2021)
The Cigarette Girl on the Tango unveils another hushed-up chapter of California history. In the depths of
the Great Depression, the Santa Ana River floods of 1938 roar through Orange County, destroying, Atwood,
a river-edge bracero hamlet. 19-year-old Willie O’Toole searches for his missing love, Elena Valenzuela,
almost certain she has drowned. At a tamale shop near the western edge of rural Santa Ana, he meets
Loretta, who looks exactly like Elena without her innocence. She claims to be Elena’s sister. But some facts
aren’t adding up. Then Willie learns Elena’s corpse washed up onshore at Seal Beach, then called “Sin
City”, the red-light district and gambling mecca of Orange County. He follows Elena’s trail to the gambling
ships offshore. There, Willie’s horrified to learn his love, Elena, didn’t drown and that Loretta isn’t who she
claimed to be. Steeped in more true but hidden history, once more the story echoes the present and strips
the makeup off our candy-coated past. Enjoy a journey to a California few people remember, where a thin
veneer of innocence masked an underworld of lies.
