Your House Will Pay

Your House Will Pay is a 2019 novel by Steph Cha. Published by Ecco, it was Cha’s fourth novel and the first not to feature private detective Juniper Song, protagonist of Follow Her Home (2013), Beware Beware (2014), and Dead Soon Enough (2015). In Your House Will Pay, Cha uses the crime fiction genre to engage more directly with Los Angeles’s history of racial injustice. A Korean American author native to the area, Cha draws inspiration from the 1991 murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du, an event that contributed to the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and decades of tension between Korean and African Americans. The novel follows two families in 2019, one Korean and one Black, still dealing with the aftermath of a similar event 28 years earlier. Your House Will Pay won the California Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

This guide is based on the 2020 Ecco paperback edition.

Content Warning: Your House Will Pay deals with racism and racially motivated violence, which is discussed in detail in this guide.

Plot Summary

In 1991, a Korean woman named Jung-Ja Han shoots an unarmed Black teenager named

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