The story of the Brooke Hart kidnapping and murder in 1933 was the sensation of not only San Jose, California, but of the entire country at a time when kidnapping for ransom was becoming the crime of choice among brazen criminals. This book was written in 1992, but as far as I know, there isn’t another book which so thoroughly examines this case.
Brooke Hart was a 22-year-old who had just been made vice-president of the department store his father owned in downtown San Jose. He was abducted and then horrifically murdered even before the kidnappers sent their first ransom note. The kidnappers were subsequently captured and a lynch mob hung them in a downtown park.
The writing is pretty pedestrian, but the subject is engrossing, so the pages really fly by. This book spends much focus on the subject of lynching. Was it the right thing to do? Is it ever the right thing to do? Did the state government know beforehand that it was going to happen, and set it up so that there was little interference with the lynching?
Read the book and decide for yourself. ( )