Crime books I read recently
April 25, 2021 · 5:45 p.m.
Your house will be paid for by Steph Cha It is a novel about two families in Los Angeles, a Korean-American and an African-American. It is a fictional version of a true case where Soon Ja Du, the owner of a Korean women’s shop, shot and killed a 15-year-old African-American girl named Latasha Harlins in 1991. He was convicted of manslaughter but did not. do not receive a prison sentence. In the novel, Jung-Ja Han shoots and kills 15-year-old Ava Matthews because she thinks Ava was trying to steal milk from her store. The narrative intersects the two families and the past and present. Ava’s brother and cousin, Shawn and Ray, are struggling to cope after Ava’s death, while she changes her name to Jung-Jak Yvonne Park and her daughter, Grace, grows up unaware of the incident until the past catches up with them. Cha takes great care to show the impact of events on both sides and is a powerful representation of the background behind racial tensions in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
I had a copy Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann part of my Kindle for a long time. It is a true crime book about a series of murders in Osage County in the 192nd. Many Native American Osage were entitled to large profits from oil deposits found in Oklahoma lands, which were forced to move out of Kansas after the American Civil War. However, they were killed in a variety of mysterious situations, including poisonings, fires and serious shootings. Grann focuses on the family of Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman who married Ernest Burkhart to a white man. A complex network of corruption eventually turned to J. Edgar Hoover, the young director of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), a former Texas Ranger named Tom White, who used undercover agents to help investigate the case.
Coincidentally, he began producing a film adaptation of the book, directed by Martin Scorses and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, this week. It’s clear that Grann had to fill in the story a bit to complete a long book (the last third mostly details how he did his research and what the FBI might have missed at the time), but it’s fascinating. story and I think it will return well to the big screen.
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