February 4, 2013
Early in Cha’s intriguing if uneven debut, Korean-American Juniper Song, a Philip Marlowe fan, accepts a request from a Yale classmate, Lucas Cook, to find out if Lori Lim, an alluring young Korean-American, is having an affair with his father, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer. After following Lim to her house in Hancock Park, Song is knocked unconscious and awakens to discover a body in the trunk of her car. She quickly realizes her apartment has been searched, and she’s being stalked. Like Marlowe, she avoids the police, skirts the legal system, and doesn’t take good advice. Her hunt for the killer becomes more urgent after a close friend’s murder. Abrupt shifts in the narrative that lead to a secondary plot about her troubled younger sister jar, but it’s clear that Song, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, and noirish young woman with a Raymond Chandler fixation is well on her way to being a first-rate investigator. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.