Gods go begging

the long version

"Jesse Pasadoble, a former infantry soldier who served his country with honor and courage, is now a defense attorney living in San Francisco. It was in Vietnam that Jesse learned to "hate death and to develop an almost anguished love of the living" during a horrific siege in which he should have died but didn't. For Jesse, the battle still rages: in his tortured memories; in the gang wars that are erupting on Potrero Hill; and now, in the cold-blooded execution of two women - one black, one Vietnamese - on the edge of a San Francisco ghetto."--BOOK JACKET. "Jesse's defense of the young man accused of the brutal double murder will take him back across the years and miles. Finding the truth will mean weaving together the disparate strands of his own haunted life, as the atrocities of the present day become inextricably linked with a battle that took place on a hilltop on the Laotian border two decades before. It is in this fragile link between the two worlds that Jesse dares to seek his own redemption."--BOOK JACKET.