Ellen Won Steil

Ellen Won Steil writes American suspense about families, concealed histories, and the pressure that public narratives place on private lives. Fortune A Novel, issued by Lake Union Publishing in 2023 under the punctuated title Fortune: A Novel, is set in Rosemary Hills, Iowa. A wealthy widow’s DNA lottery revives questions about unidentified infant remains and draws Cleo, Jemma, and Alex into scrutiny as their separate secrets begin to overlap. Steil grew up in Iowa in a Korean American family, studied journalism at Drake University, and earned a law degree before publishing fiction. Her later books include Becoming Marlow Fin and The Lives of Others. Legal training and journalistic attention appear in her interest in evidence, reputation, and competing versions of the past. Fortune A Novel distributes its central mystery among three women rather than one investigator, making motherhood, civic standing, and memory part of the suspense structure while the promised windfall steadily narrows their choices.