A review by shelleyrae
Follow Her Home by Steph Cha

3.0

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 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.