Gods Go Begging

Gods Go Begging by Mexican-American author and Vietnam veteran Alfredo Vea is a gritty thriller novel set in San Francisco, and featuring cynical veteran lawyer Jesse Pasadoble. Pasadoble struggles with his own symptoms of trauma and PTSD, particularly when his dead comrades return in daydreams to haunt him. As such, he struggles to practice his work as a defense lawyer in San Francisco, believing strongly that victims are frequently as dishonest as their attackers. A mystery unfolds when Pasadoble is tasked with defending an illiterate local gangbanger who has been charged with gunning down the owners of a local cafe called the Amazon Luncheonette, which leads Pasadoble into the grittiest parts of San Francisco and into the darkest corners of his own past.

Jesse Pasadoble has been tasked with defending Bisquit Boy, a young man who is the primary suspect in the double murder of two local businesswomen who run the Amazon Luncheonette in a shady part of San Francisco. Pasadoble, a Vietnam vet, is frequently haunted by memories of past experiences in the jungle. These flashbacks become a significant part of the novel for many reasons, one of which is the connection with the two victims, Mai and Persephone, who both lost their partners in the Vietnam War. The two women, Mai and Persephone, died in a tight embrace, mirroring the final embrace of their deceased husbands in the field.

Bisquit Boy is an illiterate gangbanger; a primary thread of this thriller is determining whether the boy is actually responsible for the double homicide or not. Pasadoble, unsure whom to believe, becomes even more confused when his own connection to an army chaplain who also died in battle becomes an increasingly significant part of the case.



Pasadoble's investigation of Bisquit Boy and the double murder of Mai and Persephone leads him into a strange part of San Francisco where the women worked. They opened their cafe in a part of San Francisco where a large community of Vietnam Vets moved to live together, creating a steadfast, if a cynical and traumatized, community of survivors. These men live in housing projects, and much of the novel illuminates the bond between Pasadoble and the veterans, who speak in a beautiful, articulate way about the struggle of surviving the war, and the haunting memories that follow them.

Pasadoble's investigation in the housing projects eventually leads him deep into the workings of the Vietnamese mob, where he finds himself entrenched in a foreign world that forces him to consider the other side of the conflict – the enemy, in theory, though Pasadoble rapidly realizes that the “enemy” suffered as much as the soldiers in that jungle war. As he goes deeper into the case, Pasadoble is forced to go deeper into his own history, in which he recalls playing games of “suppose” with his fellow comrades in the field. The game involves imagining alternative pasts in American history that would have stopped the men from being in Vietnam in the first place – suppose, the men think, that the Pilgrims had landed in South or Central America instead. Suppose it was Mexicans, not Americans, who ended up on the moon. In this way, Pasadoble and, in turn, Vea, explores Mexican-American heritage in the context of the Vietnam War, providing rare insight into the racial elements of a frequently white-washed American conflict.

Part mystery novel, part psychological examination of the effects of war on soldiers on both sides of the conflict, Gods Go Begging is a literary thriller with an interest in haunting, trauma, myth, and identity.



Alfredo Vea is a Mexican-Filipino-Yaqui-American author and lawyer. He was born in the desert in Phoenix, Arizona to a Yaqui mother around 1950. His upbringing as a mestizo man from a multilingual and multicultural background shapes his writing in a significant way. He has written four novels: La Maravilla, The Silver Cloud Cafe, God's Go Begging, and The Mexican Flyboy. God's Go Begging was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 1999, and his novel The Mexican Flyboy won the American Book Award in 2017. Critics and friends assert that Vea’s legal work influences his writing, and his passion for story-telling influences his work in the law – he frequently brings his ability to tell stories and draw from a wide array of literary and historic sources to make speeches in the courtroom.