Follow Her Home

Post-modern pulp mystery perhaps? I'm not exactly sure how to describe Steph Cha's debut novel, Follow Her Home. It introduces Juniper Song, a Gen Y, Korean/American with little ambition and an obsession with Raymond Chandler's hard boiled PI, Phillip Marlowe. When her best friend, Luke, asks her to follow the woman he suspects is having an affair with his father home from a party she is eager to emulate her idol's investigative success. But when Song gets too curious during her stakeout she is knocked unconscious, then discovers a body in her trunk and finds herself at the mercy of a psychopath determined to protect his employer's secrets.

Follow Her Home begins with a simple case of suspected adultery but slowly descends into a tangled show more web of family dysfunction, murder, blackmail and racial fetishism. This quirky mystery has plenty of dark twists to entertain the reader, though few are unpredictable. Still, the potential is there for Cha to go off script which she does on at least two memorable occasions, both of which I thought redeemed the plot. There is some elasticity in the credibility of events, not the least being Song's reluctance to involve the police the moment she found a dead body in her car.

Told in the first person, Follow Her Home also establishes Juniper's back story - her relationship with her immigrant single mother, her friendship with Luke and Diego and the tragic fate of her sister, Iris. The flashbacks are sometimes disruptive but are the only means we have to learn about Song and her drive to act as an amateur sleuth, despite being so woefully out of her depth.

The ending of Follow Her Home is as bittersweet as any of Marlowe's cases, Song may solve the mystery but not without a personal cost. While I didn't fall in love with this story or it's protagonist, I liked it's unusual edge and I'm interested to see how Steph Cha builds on it. show less

As I read this novel, I found myself wishing that Cha would stop trying to be so literary and just tell the damn story. I like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but I was kind of sick of him by the end of the novel with all the times the sleuth, Juniper Song, invoked him. Sometimes my suspension of disbelief was strained to the breaking point. I understand that mysteries, especially with amateur sleuths, often don't want to bring the cops on board, but I had a hard time buying Song's tenacious drive to solve everything herself even after she found a dead body in the trunk of her car. She just went around putting herself in dangerous situations and asking questions, and everyone always told her exactly what she wanted to know.

But my show more real issue was the prose style. Cha really overdid it with the metaphors. I mean, metaphors are supposed to help you envision the story, give depth and color and illuminate the prose. But time after time I would find a metaphor that made me pause to work out what exactly Cha was trying to express. I would have appreciated a leaner, simpler prose style.

"My dreams were miasmic tarantulous things full of sticky voices and glinting teeth, but they dissolved in the sun without aftertaste." This one actually made me chuckle, it was so Lovecraftian. Swampy, vaporous, spidery nightmares, okay, but what does a sticky voice sound like? I imagined a sort of operatic vibrato, but I'm not sure that was Cha's intent. And there were LOTS of sentences like this, which I sometimes found beautiful, and sometimes just ponderous or confusing. But time after time, they threw me out of the story as I focused on the words and grammar and not the narrative.

Despite the above quibbles, I did enjoy the novel, and read it to the end. Your House Will Pay is in my TBR pile, so it will be interesting to see if the author's style has evolved. show less

New series, new author and it shows early promise of being a very good one. Song is a Korean American, her hero is Chandler's Marlowe, which she quotes in various places throughout the novel, which I found to be great fun. Song is a character that is both flawed and heartbroken, which we find out the reason for while reading the book. There are many quirky and fun characters that fit perfectly in the story-line. The author has updated the darkness of Marlowe's LA, filled his mystery with wonderful characters, and given the reader a mystery that is both a slow reveal and a twisty mystery.

“Follow Her Home” by Steph Cha

Cha is a debut author and she kept me reading until the very end. Using literary giant Raymond Chandler’s character Philip Marlowe as her guide, Juniper Song becomes entangled in a mystery that is sordid, harrowing, and very deadly. Song is not an investigator in any way, but having read enough—at least she thinks—of Marlowe’s escapades, she attempts to draw on those situations to finagle staying alive.

Her best friend Luke needs help in finding out if his father is cheating on his mother and elicits Song to do some simple questioning. She agrees, but wishes she hadn’t. That simple task leads her to be knocked unconscious, to find a dead body in the trunk of her car, and to be threatened. And show more that’s just the beginning of her weekend.

While trying to uncover the truth of what is really going on, she realizes the case has similarities to her personal past. She tries to resolve her issues while dodging bullets and dealing with death in both the covert and well-known parts of Los Angeles. She ends up losing more than could have imagined.

Cha keeps you wanting to turn the pages with a need to know what is going on and cheering Song on to help work through the pain from her past. A well-written and very intriguing book. show less

This was Cha's first novel. I am not a fan of Raymond Chandler, and this book is very much for Chandler fans--I imagine they would enjoy it a lot more than I did. The main character, Juniper, constantly references Chandler and what his characters would do in certain situations. Is this all funny and/or clever? It very well might be, I just do not know.

I found the characters in this book to be OK, but the plot a little weak and very convoluted--it very much needed a good strong edit (which first time novels don't often get, I think). I do think this shows the potential Cha has (and as seen in Your House Will Pay, which is a much better book all around, but still shows potential).

Greta Jung is a go-to narrator for me. She is good here, show more though the pace felt slow--obviously the listener can speed it up, but I like the tone of her voice as it. show less