Your House Will Pay

You could be forgiven for wondering, for the first half of this novel, why we have it shelved in the Crime & Mystery section, as you get to know two families, the Parks and the Matthewses, in contemporary Los Angeles. There is indeed a crime, and then another one, but the mystery is less who done them than how these two families will reckon with their intensely private and unbearably public aftermath. It's a story taken from the headlines—the original crime shares many elements with the 1992 murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper—but Cha humanizes those headlines with her wide-ranging but unsentimental empathy. —Tom (audio download available from our partners at Libro.fm)