A.N. Wilson applauds four crime corkers

Two mesmerisingly brilliant first novels, one from the US, one from India, remind us that much of the best writing today is, broadly speaking, in the genre of “crime”, though both books outsoar any categorisation.

Steph Cha’s Your House will Pay (Faber &?Faber, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69) draws on a real-life incident in 1991, when a black teenage girl, apparently stealing from a Korean conven­ience store in LA, got into a fight with the shopkeeper and was shot dead. The girl died with two dollars in her hands (evidence she intended to pay for some juice) and the killer received no jail sentence. Steph Cha takes this template and makes of it a twenty-first-century revenge tragedy when the Korean shopkeeper, 20 years on, gets what appears to be her comeuppance in a parking lot, and is herself shot. The lives of the two intertwined families, the hard-grafting, unsympathetic but admirable Koreans, first-generation immigrants, and the young blacks, growing into middle age and trying to escape their gangland past, are depicted with consummate empathy and psychological skill. LA in its various districts, rich and poor, is evoked wonderfully. The narrative artistry of the book, borrowing techniques from William Faulkner, is virtuoso. This is simply a brilliant book which, genre fiction or no, deserves to be on the Booker shortlist.