From the author of the Juniper Song Mysteries trilogy, Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay is a harrowing literary mystery that grapples with racial tensions between Black and Korean American communities in Los Angeles. The 2019 novel approaches the systemic mistreatment of Black Americans by threading together the events of the city’s 1992 riots—which were catalyzed by both the beating of Rodney King by four white police officers and the 1991 shooting of teenager Latasha Harlins by a Korean convenience store clerk—with a parallel contemporary police shooting.
In the early 1990s, fictional 16-year-old Ava Matthews is killed in a Korean convenience store just weeks after King’s beating. The woman who shoots Ava faces no legal ramifications, leaving the teen’s family destroyed as the story jumps forward to the present day, where her brother Shawn, a reformed convict, is still haunted by Ava’s death. Meanwhile, Grace Park is working as a pharmacy technician in her family’s business, unaware of the secret her parents are holding on to. As present-day protests and public grief shake the city, two fractured households, the Matthews and Park families, must revisit their pasts. Cha weaves grief, injustice, and empathy together into a nuanced fictionalization of real pain. The novel won a 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize. —Armani Syed
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