In Sunset City, Melissa Ginsburg’s grimly absorbing debut novel, inseparable high school friends Charlotte Ford and Danielle Reeves meet for the first time in many years. Not long after this, Charlotte learns from police that Danielle has been brutally murdered. A detailed backstory emerges: Charlotte grew up poor, her father absent and her mother, chronically ill, dying when Charlotte was in her teens. Danielle grew up a child of privilege, hating her mother and continually testing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The rupture in their friendship occurred when Danielle started hanging out with criminals, became hooked on heroin and ended up in jail. The reunion comes about because Sally, Danielle’s estranged mother, contacts Charlotte looking for her daughter’s phone number. Sally’s news for her daughter is that a wealthy relative has died and Danielle is on the receiving end of a substantial inheritance. Though Charlotte has lots of questions, she’s willing to leave it to the police to solve her friend’s murder. But in subsequent chapters, Charlotte is slowly drawn into the shady world that Danielle inhabited, one where young women make a marginal living as porn actors and there’s always someone waiting in the shadows with a bottomless supply of drugs. Feeling bereft and a little guilty, Charlotte finds a sympathetic ear in Audrey, Danielle’s best friend from this world, and the two become intimate. But Charlotte is wary, having learned from a hardscrabble and solitary life that letting herself get too close to another person invariably leads to disappointment. Ginsburg’s high octane narrative moves at breakneck speed. The chapters are short and punchy, focusing squarely on Charlotte, her observations and opinions of herself and the people she’s spending her time with. Ginsburg writes crisp sentences with just enough carefully chosen detail to sketch a scene. But her prose shimmers and again and again she brings the grimy Houston setting vividly to life. Readers of noir fiction will find the high sleaze factor to their liking, but Ginsburg’s literary aspirations are evident in the depth and nuance of her characterizations. Sunset City serves up a heaping plateful of tragedy and wasted lives, but Charlotte Ford—lonely, deeply flawed, given to poor decisions and reckless behaviour—remains an attractive protagonist whose fate matters. ( )

This book is a quick read, full of drugs and sex, and makes you remember when you were young and all the dumb stuff you did. How pointless life seemed, so you might as well get high and hope you die young. It takes place in Houston and the protagonist is always noticing the sunset and how beautiful it is. ( )

The backside of Sunset City is covered by author-blurbs calling it everything from “entrancing,” to “smart and sexy,” to “dizzying and addictive.” One blurb calls its supposed heroine “one of the most memorable of recent years.” Another says that “Melissa Ginsburg brings a poet’s eye and ear to this story...” but that one is from the same guy who has to reference “Houston, Texas” rather than just naming the city as if anyone with even a quarter of a brain can’t place Houston in its proper state, so I knew to take his blurb with a particular grain of salt. So, five blurbs, all glowing, of course, with praise – and I have to wonder if any of them read this little 188-page novel for themselves.

Sunset City tells the story of Charlotte Ford and Danielle Reeves who were best friends before graduating high school but have lived very separate lives for a while by the time that Danielle’s mother contacts Charlotte hoping to learn her daughter’s phone number. Charlotte, because she feels so guilty for accepting $1,000 from the woman in exchange for her friend’s phone number, gets in touch with Danielle to offer her half the money and to apologize for giving in so easily. The two young women reconnect emotionally and it appears that their friendship will take off from exactly where it was before Danielle succumbed to the life of drugs, nude dancing, and booze she lives now. That, though, would never happen because just days after the two talk, a rather bumbling Houston detective shows up at Charlotte’s apartment to tell her that her friend has been murdered – and that her bloody, mutilated body was found in one of the city’s seediest motels.

So now, if you are a fan of crime fiction, especially police procedurals and the like, you expect the real fun to begin as Houston’s police department works to identify Danielle’s killer before he can get to Charlotte. Well, not this time. Instead, author Ginsburg spends the next eighty percent of the novel’s pages following Charlotte and Danielle’s friends from one drug den to the next as Charlotte drowns her grief by staying continuously stoned or drunk and sleeping with various lowlifes (of both sexes) in her old friend’s circle of friends.

And then for no apparent reason, Charlotte suddenly wises up, identifies the killer all on her own, beats the tar out of said killer, calls the cops, and is personally transformed from lowlife to “heroine.” I found it impossible to suspend my sense of disbelief to the degree that would have made Sunset City fun or intriguing to read – much less, to make it memorable for any positive reason. I recommend giving this one a pass. ( )

I kept reading hoping it would redeem itself by the end.
It didn't.
Take all the publisher descriptions with a biiiig grain of salt: "Was Danielle a hapless victim or master manipulator? Was she really intent on starting over or was it all an act? To find out the truth, Charlotte must keep her head clear and her guard up." Not even close. Makes it sound like the narrator (Charlotte) is sleuthing through Houston on a mission to find the killer of her best friend with the help of police detective Ash. Don't fall for it. There isn't a likeable character in the bunch (Ash comes as close as it gets and his judgment is seriously suspect when he instantly falls for Charlotte, who is nothing but trouble for a police officer.
We are led to believe Charlotte and Danielle were childhood friends and somehow Danielle accidentally fell into the grip of drug addiction (just case of really "bad luck" according to Charlotte); and that after getting caught and serving a prison term, Danielle was clean and turning her life around. Not exactly. These two meet in high school while working at a dismal job at a movie theater.(Danielle, the popular and flamboyant cheerleader comes from major money so of course she'd be working at an awful job) The only reason they continue working there is that they can steal money from the till and use it to buy drugs. And they slide downhill from there.
While Danielle is in prison, Charlotte works half-heartedly as a barista, lives with a loser musician-boyfriend, and occasionally thinks maybe she should -- you know -- go to college -- or something, but self-improvement isn't high on her list of things to do. When she finds out about Danielle's murder, her reaction is to quit showing up for work and find Danielle's friends and start hanging out with them. Of course since Danielle's idea of turning her life around is being a porn actress (a step up in her mind from her pre-prison vocation of pole dancing), those associates are perpetually either stoned, high, drunk or hungover and looking for their next score while having sex with whoever has a pulse. So much for the book blurb "Charlotte must keep her head clear and her guard up."
If you enjoy reading about an entire cast of people who have absolutely no interest in elevating themselves out of their squalor beyond taking drugs, this is the book for you. Plenty of lengthy, vivid descriptions of Charlotte's hallucinations while she's on whatever variety of drug she can get her hands on, though, in case that's among the criteria for good writing.
Two and a half stars is being generous. ( )

In poet Melissa Ginsburg’s debut crime novel, her home town of Houston becomes as much a character as the protagonist, Charlotte Ford, a young woman in her early 20s. Houston’s suffocating heat and dark corners, its breakneck freeways, its seedy bars and lush suburbs - a living paradigm of the income gap - are the kind of noir backdrop against which a multilayered story can play.
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’s missing a little something in the “ be a little careful” department.
Luckily for her, he’s a Houston police detective named Ash, but unluckily, he’s come to tell her that her oldest friend, the glamorous Danielle Reeves, has been bludgeoned to death. Charlotte and Danielle attended high school and took some drugs together, but Danielle drifted into heroin and didn’t get clean until she got caught. After four years in prison, her friendship with Charlotte had cooled, and she had taken up acting in porn videos.
Charlotte’s 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.
Work kept Sally so busy during Danielle’s childhood, she didn’t realize her brother was sexually abusing the girl--a plot choice that has become a cliché 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’s murder. Did Charlotte’s visit begin a deadly chain of events?
She starts hanging out with Danielle’s new friends—fellow 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’ access to their thoughts and feelings. Their motivations and experiences are always second-hand, filtered through Charlotte. I’d contrast this approach with John Schulian’s A Better Goodbye, which provides a fully rounded picture of people working in the sex trade.
Ginsburg attended the Iowa Writers’ 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, “Loud and ugly, the place banged against my eyes." 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. ( )