Dead Soon Enough

Starred review from June 22, 2015
Cha wins the reader’s sympathies for her L.A. PI at the outset of her outstanding third Juniper Song mystery (after 2014’s Beware Beware). When at age 22 Song “was broke, bored, and quietly depressed, and had no strength to fight the call of easy money,” she decided to become an ovum donor and sold three sets of her eggs for $48,000. Years later, a new case revives memories of what for her was a questionable decision. Rubina Gasparian, a 37-year-old doctor who’s unable to conceive with her husband, has arranged for her 26-year-old cousin, Lusig, to serve as her gestational surrogate. With only a month to go before the due date, Rubina is anxious that Lusig isn’t taking care of either herself or the fetus, and she hires Song to follow Lusig. The gumshoe finds that Lusig’s main source of stress is anxiety about a friend who’s been missing for about a month, Nora Mkrtchian, the daughter of Armenian immigrants from the Soviet Union. Nora ran a website devoted to discussing the Armenian genocide of 1915, and her blog posts attracted a lot of creepy haters, so Song’s focus shifts from Lusig to ascertaining Nora’s fate. Veronica Mars fans will be pleased. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.

June 1, 2015
Tracking the surrogate mother for a high-maintenance client leads a bright young shamus to delve into Armenian cultural history and the meaning of closure. No longer a rookie private investigator (Beware, Beware, 2014, etc.), Juniper Song has graduated from digging through the trash of suspected liars and cheaters to actual detective work. Her latest client, Dr. Rubina Gasparian, has some control issues about what exactly she wants investigated. Song is game for the job, though she has suspicions about her assigned task: to follow Rubina's very pregnant cousin Lusig, who's acting as a surrogate for the infertile Rubina. Rubina has been doing some amateur detective work herself and has already taken the liberty of applying a GPS device to Lusig's car. Song learns that one of the reasons Lusig has evaded Rubina's watchful eye is that she's engaged in some detective work of her own: Lusig's closest friend, Nora, has been missing for about a month, and Lusig is tenaciously tracking down untapped leads. It seems that Nora's confrontational blog, Who Still Talks, a forum on the 1915 Armenian genocide and its deniers, may have brought the historical debate from online chatter to something up close and personal. In order to protect what's most important to her, the child Lusig is carrying, Rubina hires Song to find Nora so Lusig can stay home and let nature take its course. Apart from milking Veronica Sanchez, her LAPD connection, it appears the best thing Song can do is learn about the genocide, the deniers, and Who Still Talks. Her search leads Song down a rabbit hole of complex relations, perhaps involving hazy government connections, though the truth of what happened to Nora may be much closer to home. Once more, Cha often sacrifices suspense and plot twists for a more philosophical approach to mystery, though she clearly knows where she wants to go.

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August 1, 2015

In her third outing after Beware Beware, the intrepid Juniper Song gets drawn into the disappearance of a young activist woman involved in a battle over a proposed Armenian genocide memorial. Juniper's client is a female doctor named Rubina, whose younger cousin, Lusig, is acting as her gestational surrogate. Rubina worries that Lusig's search for her missing friend will take a toll on her pregnancy. Cha takes full advantage of the multicultural Los Angeles setting to introduce a melting pot of Korean, Armenian, Hispanic, and Filipina characters. The mystery has just enough twists and turns and red herrings to keep the reader enthralled until the final reveal, which doesn't disappoint. VERDICT In her private detective, Cha has created a worthy modern entrant into classic L.A. noir fiction. An excellent choice for fans of Sue Grafton--Song shares many traits with Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, including doggedness, earnestness, and pragmatism. [See Prepub Alert, 2/23/15.]--Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2015
PI Juniper Song's new case looks easy. She's hired to track the surrogate carrying the unborn son of Doctors Rubina and Van Gasparian, and the eight-months-pregnant woman is Rubina's beloved cousin Lusig. Complications start when Lusig admits to being stressed by the disappearance of her best friend, Nora Mkrtchian, an activist and blogger who has been harassed for her statements regarding the Armenian genocide as its centenary approaches. So Song's case expands to include a hunt for Nora. Gradually a tangled mass of secrets and lies are exposed, some at the heart of the Gasparian family, with no painless answers for Song, who's left to make a dreadful choice to save her own life. The one bright note in this third Juniper Song mystery is the introduction of lawyer Robert Park, with whom Song sees a possible relationship. That ray of light aside, this is another example of Cha's grasp of L.A. noir, depicting a world in which truth is bent and compromises made with impunity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)