![]() ![]() ![]() She received no jail time.” The case was a factor in the uprising that roiled the city in April 1992 after the not-guilty verdicts in the police beating of Rodney King.Ĭha has done her research, although that’s just one measure of how Your House Will Pay succeeds. “The whole thing was caught on video,” Cha explains in an author’s note, “and Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Such a sentiment-or recognition-resonates throughout Your House Will Pay, which takes as an inspiration the real-life death of Latasha Harlins, who was shot on March 16, 1991, in South Los Angeles by convenience store owner Soon Ja Du. ![]() ![]() “Someone can just come in and kill you with the full blessing of the law.” “See, it don’t matter what you do if you’re black in America,” an activist declares early in the novel. But the real crime at the center of this essential novel is that of race. There is a crime here, or (to be more accurate) two crimes: the first taking place in 1991, when a Korean American shop owner shoots and kills a Black teenager in her store in South Los Angeles, and the second coming nearly 30 years later when that same shop owner is gunned down in a Northridge parking lot. In her fourth novel, Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha effectively resets the parameters of crime fiction-if, indeed, we can use such a label to describe this book. ![]()
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