{"id":505,"date":"2018-12-31T12:34:42","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=505"},"modified":"2018-12-31T12:34:42","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:34:42","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-51","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=505","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span>FICTION\/SUSPENSE<\/p>\n

Melissa Ginsburg<\/span><\/p>\n

Sunset City<\/span><\/p>\n

Ecco, 978-0-06-242970-4, hardcover (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 208 pgs., $25.99<\/p>\n

April 12, 2016<\/p>\n

\u201cHouston was always flooding, the whole city built atop paved wetlands<\/span>. The storm kept the sky dark, and the streetlights glowed through the morning. I stepped into my rubber boots and splashed to the barbecue shack around the corner.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Charlotte Ford returns to her apartment with her brisket and beer, Detective Ash is waiting on the landing to tell her that Danielle, her friend since high school, has been found bludgeoned to death in a seedy motel room. Danielle and her mother, Sally, have been estranged for years but Sally has recently contacted Charlotte, offering her a $1,000 bribe for Danielle\u2019s phone number, so she could tell Danielle about an inheritance. Charlotte has met Danielle for a drink just a few days before her death to tell her about Sally and offer her half the money.<\/p>\n

Charlotte has thought Danielle\u2019s stint in prison had finally cured her of the drugs and her future looked brighter, even if she has been \u201cmodeling\u201d in porn films with her new friends. As Charlotte simultaneously searches for answers and tries to escape her feelings with vodka that \u201ctasted like air-conditioning, crisp and clean\u201d and cocaine like \u201cfluorescent light in my bloodstream,\u201d she moves ever closer to the killer and becomes a target herself.<\/p>\n

Sunset City, <\/span>poet Melissa Ginsburg\u2019s first novel, is a soulful, sexy, dangerous noir. In all good noir the location is an essential character in the story\u2014and Houston\u2019s slippery underbelly fits the bill. It\u2019s all here: the bayous, ship channel refineries, Memorial Park, River Oaks, Montrose, Rudyard\u2019s, and, always, real estate, in a city \u201cthat never stopped, it reached and reached,\u201d where money exerts a \u201cgravitational pull.\u201d Ginsburg\u2019s simple plot allows atmosphere to suffuse the story. You\u2019ll feel the humidity on your upper lip and see the vivid, chemical sunsets for which the book is named.<\/p>\n

Charlotte, the most fully developed character, is sympathetic but frustrating in her self-destruction, as if she wants to beat someone else to the punch, feeling like \u201ca poison I couldn\u2019t stop swallowing.\u201d She comes undone in the immediate aftermath of Danielle\u2019s murder, on a drug and booze-soaked mental flight, trying to numb her grief. Ginsburg writes one of the best altered states I\u2019ve ever read, both darkly humorous and melancholy, when Charlotte ends up in the drunk tank and it becomes \u201cclear that someone, at some point during the night, had made a bad decision.\u201d<\/p>\n

As befits a poet, Ginsburg is a master of the startlingly evocative turn of phrase. Charlotte\u2019s first-person narrative is littered with them. She observes of a man in a bar that she\u2019s not particularly interested in: \u201cHe was boring, but I didn\u2019t mind, because his attention was interesting.\u201d Detective Ash \u201cstared at me like you would a sculpture, without caring what it thought.\u201d After viewing crime-scene photos, Charlotte observes that Danielle\u2019s \u201cfake boobs sat on top of the wrecked body, intact, pointing the wrong way.\u201d Talk about verisimilitude.<\/p>\n

Ginsburg presents a menu of suspects and drops clues nonchalantly\u2014expertly\u2014as if she\u2019s writing a fifth noir, not a first. She has created a page-turner with a pitch-perfect conclusion. Sunset City<\/span> is poetry noir.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Foreword Reviews, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, and blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com. Her reviews appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}