Sunset City

I read this simply because it was short and sounded fairly interesting. What I got was a weird mystery with a main character who is just a mess. Seriously, Charlotte drinks constantly and does drugs like most people breathe. Also, everyone she comes in contact with wants to sleep with her, including the mature, older detective who spends very little time in this story actually detecting.
Ginsburg's voice is fine, I'm not a thriller reader but I didn't find this to be a real edge of your seat read. It was just...okay. And short.

Noir doesn't (apparently) mean what it once did.

I was expecting mystery and I was expecting dark. I got mystery and I got dark.

But not just dark. Black. The blackest.

Sunset City is a short novel set in Houston about a young woman trying to find her way. She doesn't enjoy her work. She doesn't have any family. Her friends are involved in all sorts of unsavory activities. And then one of her friends is found dead. Murdered.

Probably just me but I just wasn't carried away by the story. The Houston references were accurate but they didn't feel distinctive; they felt thrown in. The grit of the story was accurate, I'm sure, but it didn't touch me emotionally.