Steph Cha

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of City in Ruins, Don Winslow, and series editor Steph Cha.The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.Don Winslow, the Raymond Chandler Award-winning author of City in Ruins, picks the best twenty mystery and suspense stories from the previous year.

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby, author of Razorblade Tears, and series editor Steph Cha.In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is “a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues crime fiction with its gravitas.” The stories in this col-lection overflow with gravitas in the most unexpected ways: a cryptic note left on a windshield, a murder for hire meets a game of Mouse Trap, a swipe right on a dating app goes horribly wrong. From an eleven-year-old drawn to the neighborhood spookhouse to a scholarship kid at an exclusive boarding school, a nefarious Old West gunman to a Florida woman’s struggle against both outer and inner demons, the characters in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 are haunted and haunting, and wholly unforgettable. The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024 includes MEGAN ABBOTT • ALYSSA COLE • TANANARIVE DUE • ABBY GENI • JORDAN HARPER • GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD •TONI LP KELNER • BOBBY MATHEWS • LISA UNGER • and others

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger and series editor Steph Cha.“This form has a special kind of magic, the ability to transport you quickly, intensely, to capture character, time, place, and story with immediacy,” writes guest editor Lisa Unger in her introduction. The transporting stories in this year’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense are populated by those who exist on the fringe of our society and want more than what life has dealt them: A haunted veteran turned career criminal is on the run. An injured fighter turned bouncer seeks vengeance for his lost love. An assassin on his last job finds himself questioning his life choices and breaks all the rules to understand his final victim. By turns thrilling and enlightening, each story, according to Unger, “will have you holding your breath, flipping the pages, will leave you thinking about people and why they do the dark, dangerous, frightening things that they do.”The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023 includes Ashley-­Ruth M. Bernier • William Boyle • S. A. Cosby • Jacqueline Freimor • James A. Hearn • Ladee Hubbard • A. J. Jacono • Adam Meyer • Silvia Moreno-­Garcia • Walter Mosley • Leigh Newman • Joyce Carol Oates • Margaret Randall • Annie Reed • Anthony Neil Smith • Faye Snowden • Jervey Tervalon • Joseph S. Walker • Thaai Walker • Jess Walter

A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha. New York Times bestselling author and “superb storyteller” (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Steph Cha, a rising star who brings a fresh perspective as series editor, takes the helm of the new The Best American Mystery and Suspense, with best-selling crime novelist Alafair Burke joining her as the first guest editor."Crime writers, forgive the pun, are killing it right now creatively," writes guest editor Alafair Burke in her introduction. "It was difficult--painful even--to narrow this year's Best American Mystery and Suspense to only twenty stories." Spanning from a mediocre spa in Florida, to New York's gritty East Village, to death row in Alabama, this collection reveals boundless suspense in small, quiet moments, offering startling twists in the least likely of places. From a powerful response to hateful bullying, to a fight for health care, to a gripping desperation to vote, these stories are equal parts shocking, devastating, and enthralling, revealing the tension pulsing through our everyday lives and affirming that mystery and suspense writing is better than ever before.The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021includes JENNY BHATT- GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD- GABINO IGLESIAS- AYA DE LE N- LAURA LIPPMAN DELIA C. PITTS- ALEX SEGURA- FAYE SNOWDEN- LISA UNGER and others

Back in print: the classic noir novel by one of America's pioneering women crime writers Are you trying to tell me you don't want the job, Mr. Sader?: It started as a missing persons case and grew more puzzling with the discovery of another strangely coincidental disappearance. Private eye Jim Sader finds himself deep in a multilayered intrigue revolving around oil and real estate and the sleazy underpinnings of Long Beach, California, in the 1950s. Taut, suspenseful, and gritty: many consider this Dolores Hitchens' best novel.

Private eye Jim Sader returns in a hard-hitting hunt for a missing child through the dark corners of sunny southern California You're playing with a child's life: The search for a kidnapped boy leads private detective (and ex-alcoholic) Jim Sader through a labyrinth of well-hidden family secrets and into the heart of an elaborate and malevolent deception. With little to go on--a tight-lipped client, an anonymous letter, a mother who is supposed to be dead--Sader must rely on his wits to find the child even as he outraces the demons that dog him. Sleep with a Slander is a novel in the classic hardboiled tradition, tough, compassionate, and tautly told.

'Compelling from first to last page.' DENISE MINAMeet Juniper Song, an under employed, twenty-something, Raymond-Chandler-loving, Korean American woman from downtown LA.When a friend asks Song to carry out surveillance on his father, she figures she doesn't have anything better to do - plus she gets to indulge her Philip Marlowe fantasies. But barely half a day into playing private eye someone has knocked her unconscious and left a dead body in the trunk of her car.

'Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler would be proud.' LA TimesJuniper Song has a new gig: apprenticed to a private investigation firm in downtown LA, she's racking up hours following cheating spouses.When a NY artist hires Song to keep an eye on her long-distance boyfriend in LA, Song has no problem tailing the guy - until a panicked late-night phone call has her racing to the iconic Roosevelt Hotel. There, in the aftermath of a wild party in its top-floor suite, she finds only two people left: the boyfriend and a Hollywood legend. Only one of them is still alive.

'A gritty, politically charged mystery.' LA TimesJuniper Song - private detective - has a talent for surveillance, and for knowing when a client isn't telling her the whole story.Rubina Gasparian, Song's latest client, is worried about her cousin, who just happens to be carrying her baby as a surrogate. Something tells Song she's been hired to do more than just follow a heavily pregnant twenty-six-year-old around LA, and soon enough, she finds herself caught in the dangerous underbelly of one of LA's biggest immigrant communities.

Two families. One desperate to remember, the other to forget.Winner of the LA Times Book Prize, Best Mystery/ThrillerWinner of the California Book Awards' Gold Medal for FictionShortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) DaggerShortlisted for the Macavity Awards, Best Mystery Novel Shortlisted for the Anthony Awards, Best NovelFinalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award'Masterful.' Ruth Ware'A searing examination of racial and family politics that is also an immaculately constructed whodunit.' Daily Telegraph, Summer Reads'Writing a page-turner about racial politics in the U.S. is a delicate enterprise fraught with pitfalls, but Cha manages it superbly in this thought-provoking family saga.' Daily Mail, Summer ReadsGrace Park and Shawn Mathews share a city, but seemingly little else. Coming from different generations and very different communities, their paths wouldn't normally cross at all. As Grace battles confusion over her elder sister's estrangement from their Korean-immigrant parents, Shawn tries to help his cousin Ray readjust to life on the outside after years spent in prison.But something in their past links these two families. As the city around them threatens to spark into violence, echoing events from their past, the lives of Grace and Shawn are set to collide in ways which will change them all forever.Beautifully written, and marked by its aching humanity as much as its growing sense of dread, Your House Will Pay is a powerful and moving family story, perfect for readers of Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere and Paul Beatty's The Sellout.What readers are saying:'Simultaneously thrilling and thoughtful... a terrific, fast-moving story of two characters trying to live with the truth.''A must-read.''This novel is wonderful... it will stick with you.''Sensitive and astute, it's a book we need right now, and it's a book that lingers, offering plenty to think about.''A smart, powerful, fully-engaged book that never once blinks or backs down or takes an easy out, and then nails one of the best endings I've ever read.'

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE" A] suspense-filled page-turner." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer"A touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision." --Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, BluebirdA Best Book of the YearWall Street Journal * Chicago Tribune * Buzzfeed * South Florida Sun-Sentinel * Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel * Book Riot * LitHub A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions in Los Angeles, following two families--one Korean-American, one African-American--grappling with the effects of a decades-old crimeIn the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace's understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

ONE CITY. TWO FAMILIES. MANY SECRETS. In 1991 Shawn, a young African-American teen, his sister Ava, and cousin Ray, set out across LA to a screening of New Jack City. But in the volatile atmosphere of that time, they never make it inside the cinema. Nearly three decades later, police brutality still afflicts the city, but Grace, a Korean-American twenty-something pharmacist living and working with her parents, has her own problems, as she tries to figure out why her older sister, Miriam, still refuses to speak with their mother. Across the county, Shawn is trying to ease Ray, fresh out of prison, back into everyday life, but both men are struggling, still haunted by the events of 1991 and their shared loss. When a shocking new crime strikes the city, the lives of Grace and Shawn - two people from different cultures and generations - collide in a way which could change them forever.

"With Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles's violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding--of the pull of generational violence and its enduring devastation, but also of the power of human grace against all odds. It's a touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city." --Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, BluebirdIn the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace's understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

"With Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles's violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding--of the pull of generational violence and its enduring devastation, but also of the power of human grace against all odds. It's a touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city." --Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, BluebirdIn the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace's understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

"With Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles's violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding--of the pull of generational violence and its enduring devastation, but also of the power of human grace against all odds. It's a touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city." --Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, BluebirdIn the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace's understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

From critically acclaimed author Steph Cha-Los Angeles-based P.I. Juniper Song is back in a thrilling story about heritage and responsibility, motherhood and genocide. Finally a licensed private detective, Steph Cha's "compelling and original" (LA Times) crime heroine Juniper Song is managing her own cases as the junior investigator of Lindley & Flores. When a woman named Rubina Gasparian approaches Song, she knows she's in for her most unusual case yet. Rubina and her husband Van-both Armenian-American doctors-cannot get pregnant, so Rubina's younger cousin, Lusig, is acting as their surrogate. However, Lusig's best friend Nora has been missing for a month, and Rubina is concerned that her nearly eight-month-pregnant cousin is dealing with her stress in a way that could harm the baby. Rubina hires Song to shadow her and report all that she finds. Of course, Lusig is frantically searching for Nora, and Song's case soon turns into a hunt for the missing woman, an activist embroiled in an ugly, public battle over the erection of an Armenian genocide memorial. As Song probes the depths of both the tight-knit Armenian-American community and the groups who antagonize it, she realizes that Nora was surrounded on all sides by danger. But can she find out what happened before it's too late for Nora or Rubina and Van's child-or for Song herself? A gorgeously written, tightly plotted, and emotionally charged read, Dead Soon Enough is an unforgettable story of what we will do for the things we believe in, and the people we love, perfect for fans of Lisa Unger and Tana French.

A stunning, edgy debut introducing Juniper Song, an amateur sleuth taking on the darkness in the veins of L.A. with razor-sharp wit and a breaking heart. Juniper Song knows secrets-how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend Luke asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young employee, Juniper (or "Song" as her friends call her) finds an opportunity to play detective. Driving through L.A.'s side streets, following leads, tailing suspects-it all appeals to Song's romantic ideal of the noir hero. But when she's knocked out while investigating a mysterious car and finds a body in her own trunk, Song lurches back to the real L.A., becoming embroiled in a crime that goes far beyond role play. What's more, this isn't the first time Song has stuck her nose in other people's business. As she fights to discover the truth about her friend's family, Song reveals one of her own deeply hidden secrets, something dark and damaging, urging her to see the current mystery through, to rectify the mistakes of her past life. A dazzling debut from fresh new talent Steph Cha, featuring a strong, modern, sharply observant heroine with an unforgettable voice, Follow Her Home takes readers through dangerous twists and turns, beyond the glittering high-rises and freeways of L.A. on a case that will stay with them long after the final page. Praise for Follow Her Home " Song] is a compelling and original protagonist... One only hopes that Cha and her driven, neo-noir detective have more opportunities to explore those troubling intersections over many books to come." -LA Times "Stephanie Cha's brilliant debut is as Noir as Old Nick's sense of humour. Compelling from first to last page, she takes on contemporary L.A., sweeping the reader through Chandler's twilight, heartbroken city from mansions to faux K-town hostess bars. L.A. Noir at its finest." -- Denise Mina, author of The Dead Hour "Follow Her Home takes a fresh trip down the sunny, dark streets of Los Angeles, and Juniper Song is a great guide - young, sharp, and worldly-wise. Keenly observed and deeply felt, the story slowly got under my skin. I couldn't put it down." - Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award-winning author of Ransom River "In a glittery L.A. of pretty, privileged twentysomethings, Stephanie Cha's Follow Her Home opens like a playful homage to Raymond Chandler but deepens into something darker: an utterly 21st-century ode to sisterhood in the face of crime. A fast-paced thriller told in smart, sparkling prose, Follow Her Home is a moving exploration of mothers and daughters, men and women, immigrant history, loss, and hope." -Joy Castro, author of Hell or High Water