Your House Will Pay

While this novel is a suspenseful psychological thriller in its own right, the story also tackles racial tensions and contemporary family dynamics. I admire the way Steph Cha explores grief, revenge, violence, racism, and justice over the course of Your House Will Pay’s fast-paced plot. This is absolutely a must-read.

Is there any subject more complex, fraught, and important as race in America? And perhaps nothing is more challenging to write about, riskier, presenting nearly unlimited opportunities for disagreement, which seems to get more and more passionate, more and more polarized, every day. This remarkable novel by Steph Cha unflinchingly tackles the subject head-on in Los Angeles—the city of the Rodney King beating as background, and the city of today as foreground—through the lens of a multigenerational entanglement of a Korean American family with an African American one, defying the simplistic and reductionist tendencies of so much writing about race.

There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do the Right Thing where a Korean clerk pleads to the African-American mob about to destroy his store, “Me no white. Me Black.” The tension is more than palpable, and this is exactly the nervy road Steph navigates throughout her remarkable novel Your House Will Pay. Based on the real-life 1991 Los Angeles murder of a Black woman by a Korean convenience store owner, the twin narratives switch between the two families boiling over in this cauldron of racial violence. This brave, unflinching book offers no easy answers, which is exactly… show more.

Your House Will Pay is about the tragic link between two Southern California families living in Palmdale and Granada Hills. The novel switches between points of view and time periods, allowing a valuable perspective on the tensions between Black and Korean American communities thirty years ago and in present day. Suspense-filled and deftly plotted, Cha’s novel is a compelling page-turner about murder, secrets, racial divides, and ultimately hope.