Phinney’s first book, The Anaheim Beauties Valencia Queen, incorporates these facts behind the heavy presence of the Klu Klux Klan in Anaheim during the early and mid-1900’s. The book 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. With stealth, in 1924 the Ku Klux Klan took over Anaheim’s city council plus ten of eleven slots on the police force. In a Roaring 20’s citrus-packing suburb of 10,000 people, where the ethics of Jay Gatsby collide with those of Elmer Gantry, an aspiring high school pitching phenom, fatherless Dean Reynolds, falls under the spell of drop-dead-gorgeous Helen Webber and her agenda-driven, rich father.
In Phinney’ second book, The Cigarette Girl on the Tango, he uses the backdrop of the loophole organized crime used to offer legal gambling in the Los Angeles area in the 1920’s. Phinney uses this piece of gambling history in his book when he 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.
The third book in the series, The Society for the Complete Extermination of Ethan Frome, harkens back to 1971, when the Vietnam War had the U.S. population polarized. The story captures the heightened sense of anxiety and uncertainty that permeated society through a coming-of-age historical fiction novel that mirrors our current age of privilege and shaming.
