Steph Cha

Steph Cha (born 1986) is a Korean American novelist and fiction writer, who has released three novels in the crime fiction genre about her detective protagonist Juniper Song: Follow Her Home, Beware Beware (2014), and Dead Soon Enough (2015). Her most recent book, stand-alone crime fiction novel Your House Will Pay (2019), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery. She also co-created and co-wrote the Amazon Prime Video series Butterfly.

Background Cha was born in Van Nuys, California in 1986. She subsequently grew up in Encino, California with her mother, father and two younger brothers. She attended Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City. Cha graduated from Stanford University, where she studied English and East Asian Studies, and also completed a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School.

Work

Novels In 2013, Cha published her first Juniper Song mystery, Follow Her Home (2013) with Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press and Macmillan Publishers. The book has received positive reviews from the Los Angeles Times, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Hyphen, KoreAm Journal, and other publications. The sequel Beware Beware (2014) was published the following year in 2014, also by Minotaur Books. The third novel in the series, Dead Soon Enough was published by Minotaur Books in 2015.

Other Writing Cha also has published freelance book reviews and food writing for the Los Angeles Times (serving as a restaurant scout and a protégé of sorts for LA Times ' Pulitzer Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold), humor pieces for Trop Magazine and a short story entitled "Treasures in Heaven" in the Winter 2013 Fiction Issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Cha has also written more than 2,400 reviews on Yelp, according to a Los Angeles Times interview, Aspen Words Literary Prize — Barry Award Barry–Novel Dagger Award New Blood Dagger Award Macavity Award Macavity–Novel