fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Witness, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a lawyer at a global investment company.
Pek's debut novel is The Verifiers.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels "that feature wildly different detectives—a Cold War spy, an Scottish journalist in the 1980s, and a multiverse traveller, to name a few—all of whom have deeply compelling voices and personal stories," including:
Land of Shadows by Rachel Howzell HallRead about the other entries on the list.
Detective Elouise “Lou” Norton is a Black LAPD homicide detective whose sister went missing as a teenager. When, years later, thebody of another teenage girl is found in the same neighborhood, Lou becomes convinced that the two crimes are linked and that by solving this murder, she can finally learn what happened to her sister. Lou’s voice pulls you along from the very first page: she’s smart and snarky and driven, her observations spot-on and frequently hilarious, someone whose toughness makes her vulnerability even more poignant. Plus, I love how fully Lou’s life is portrayed—she may be focused on solving a crime, but she also has a circle of close friends, a philandering husband to worry about, and colleagues who respect and also challenge her.
Hall's Lou Norton series is among Amy Stuart's five deeply flawed characters you’ll learn to appreciate and Sara Sligar's seven California crime novels with a nuanced view of of race, class, gender & community. Land of Shadows is among Steph Cha's top ten books about trouble in Los Angeles.
--Marshal Zeringue
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