Inspired by the death of Latasha Harlins, who was shot and killed on March 16, 1991, by Los Angeles convenience store owner Soon Ja Du, Steph Cha’s novel Your House Will Pay takes as its starting point the uprising that roiled Los Angeles in 1992. The immediate catalyst for this event was the not-guilty verdicts in the police beating of Rodney King, but the Harlins case was also a significant factor. Cha is a skilled writer of crime fiction; her previous books feature the detective Juniper Song. Here, however, she casts a wider net, using the murder and its fallout to portray three decades in the lives of two Los Angeles families, one Black and the other Korean American, irrevocably connected by the legacy of the city and its racial sins.•
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