{"id":5605,"date":"2016-04-29T06:27:34","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T10:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5605"},"modified":"2016-04-29T06:27:34","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T10:27:34","slug":"sunset-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5605","title":{"rendered":"***Sunset City"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Houston,

photo: Adam Baker, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Melissa Ginsburg —<\/strong> Lots of buzz about poet Melissa Ginsburg\u2019s debut crime novel. In it, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston\u2019s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs – a living paradigm of the income gap\u00a0–\u00a0are the kind of noir backdrop against which a multilayered story can play.<\/p>\n

Narrated by Charlotte, the story begins in a terrific rainstorm when she encounters a man on the landing outside her apartment and unlocks her door in front of him – the first clue she\u2019s missing a little something in the \u201c be a little careful\u201d department.<\/p>\n

Luckily for her, he\u2019s a Houston police detective named Ash, but unluckily, he\u2019s come to tell her that her oldest friend, the glamorous Danielle Reeves, has been bludgeoned to death. Charlotte and Danielle attended\u00a0high school and took some drugs together, but Danielle drifted into heroin and didn\u2019t get clean until she got caught. After four years in prison, her friendship with Charlotte had cooled, and she had taken up\u00a0acting in porn videos.<\/p>\n

Charlotte\u2019s back story is handled mostly in a couple of awkward information dumps about her deceased mother, high school years, and growing up relatively poor. Danielle, by contrast, came from money. Her mother, Sally, from whom she is estranged, had a high-powered, high-paying job. What they had in common was that both of them were rather neglected–Charlotte because her mother was a chronic pain patient, and Danielle because of the demands of her work. No dads in the picture.<\/p>\n

Work kept Sally so busy during Danielle\u2019s childhood, she didn\u2019t realize her brother was sexually abusing the girl–a plot choice that has become a clich\u00e9 and, here, is not explored for its specific impact on Danielle. Now Sally wants to be in touch with Danielle and enlists Charlotte to do the outreach. That mission puts the two former best friends in touch again, just two days before Danielle\u2019s murder. Did\u00a0Charlotte\u2019s visit begin\u00a0a deadly chain of events?<\/p>\n

She starts hanging out with Danielle\u2019s new friends\u2014fellow actress Audrey (another child sexual abuse victim) and video producer Brandon. To Charlotte these people seem exotic, but the first-person point of view limits readers\u2019 access to their thoughts and feelings. Their motivations and\u00a0experiences are always second-hand, filtered through Charlotte. I\u2019d contrast this approach with John Schulian\u2019s A Better Goodbye<\/a>, which provides a fully rounded picture of people working in the sex trade.<\/p>\n

Ginsburg attended the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi. In this novel, she mostly avoids literary flourishes, but occasionally her poetic side peeks through. For example, regarding the police station, Charlotte says, \u201cLoud and ugly, the place banged against my eyes.”\u00a0 Ginsburg does not shrink from discussing the seamier side of life and its difficulties, which is brave for a first novel, and in future perhaps her characters will be strong enough to carry that weight.<\/p>\n

A longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover<\/a> review website.
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