in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Her short fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Witness, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a lawyer at a global investment company.
Pek's debut novel is The Verifiers.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels "that feature wildly different detectives—a Cold War spy, a Scottish journalist in the 1980s, and a multiverse traveller, to name a few—all of whom have deeply compelling voices and personal stories," including:
Follow Her Home by Steph ChaRead about another entry on the list.
As a writer who gets pretty attached to her characters, I have to admire how Steph Cha destroys her amateur-detective protagonist’s life over the course of a few days. Juniper Song, self-described “half-employed twentysomething”, has been adrift since tragedy befell her younger sister while Song was away at college, for which Song holds herself to some extent responsible. Now she lives in Los Angeles, whereshe grew up, reads Raymond Chandler novels (she’s obsessed with Philip Marlowe), and hangs out with Diego and Luke, her two best friends from college. Then Luke asks her to investigate whether his father is having an affair, as Luke suspects, and Song’s life turns into its own noir novel—a fact she notes more than once—complete with dead bodies in car trunks, threats from menacing strangers, femme fatales, and once again losing those closest to her.
Song is a second-generation Korean American, and the passages describing her upbringing and her family—as well as what it’s like to move through America as a young Asian woman—are among the most affecting in the novel.
Follow Her Home is among Katie Orphan's thirty-four essential crime novels of Los Angeles and Cristina Alger's seven truly badass female protagonists in thrillers.
My Book, The Movie: Follow Her Home.
The Page 69 Test: Follow Her Home.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
