In “Sunset City,” Melissa Ginsburg’s hypnotic first novel, the author’s native Houston emerges as a hot new locale for literary noir. Alienated, smoggy, choked with traffic, crowned with brilliant, “pollution-stained” sunsets, Ginsburg’s Houston is where barista Charlotte Ford finds a detective waiting for her in the rain in front of her building. Danielle Reeves, Charlotte’s “oldest, dearest friend,” has been found murdered, bludgeoned to death in a motel room.
Growing up, Charlotte and Danielle were inseparable. Both girls had absent mothers — Charlotte’s was addicted to painkillers, which eventually killed her; Danielle’s, a wealthy developer, was emotionally unavailable, married to her career. Both liked drugs, but Danielle liked them more. She got hooked on heroin, did time for possession, and lost touch with Charlotte. The estranged friends met up again just days before the murder. Danielle was off drugs and working for a porn website called SweetDreamz.net. She seemed happy and healthy. Charlotte didn’t kill her, but their meeting was the one anomaly in Danielle’s recent past. Whatever happened, it had something to do with Charlotte.
Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collection “Dear Weather Ghost” and the chapbook “Arbor.” Her training as a poet infuses the often workmanlike construction of crime fiction (“He poured a drink,” “She lit a cigarette,” “The phone rang”) with lyricism and pathos. It also informs the book’s pacing, driven more by atmosphere than plot.
This is a ghost story disguised as a detective story. Charlotte is consumed by Danielle’s murder, but she’s no amateur sleuth. Her response is closer to a lot of real people’s: She reaches for the whiskey, not the binoculars. She screws up at work and is let go. Through a kind of boozy osmosis, Charlotte draws steadily closer to the truth, prodded by the handsome detective in charge of the case, her own memories, and her interactions with the people who last saw Danielle. The cast includes Sally Reeves, Danielle’s mother; Brandon Young, her hot-tempered lover and porn director; and Audrey, her beautiful but drug-addled friend and scene partner.
In the book’s most memorable moments, Ginsburg blends the erotic with the macabre. One of Danielle’s porn clips arouses even as it fondly recalls a friend’s familiar gesture. The action builds to a steamy, ketamine-fueled séance in which Charlotte and Ginsburg “let in the dead.”
Readers expecting a standard whodunit will find the bare bones here, but “Sunset City” is richer for the stories it tells instead: an elegy for friendship, a sexy, unromantic ode to a city, and, finally, a coming-of-age tale older than the pavement over Houston’s wetlands, about walking through the underworld and coming out changed on the other side — if you make it.
