David Gordon

Taking a job as an assistant to housebound detective Solar Lonsky, failed Los Angeles novelist Sam Kornberg tackles an assignment to track a mysterious woman in a case marked by sexy doppelgangers, mental asylums and video-store geekery. By the Edgar Award-finalist author of The Serialist. 20,000 first printing.

A Novel

Mystery Girl

Jessica Nottingham

Mystery Girl was what my grandmother likes to call an "odd duck". I don't know what I was expecting it to be when I accepted it for review, but I can tell you it wasn't what I was presented with. Not to say that's a bad thing. Quite the opposite actually! This was a read that grew on me and, as it it did, took me to a whole new place.

Sam Kornberg is just your typical, unemployed, recently divorced and failed novelist. Is typical the right word? We meet a man who is at rock bottom. I have to say that his character spoke volumes to me. Sam can feel campy at times, but he's really a very deep person. His views on the male psyche, on creating art, and actually pretty much everything, have massive depth and breadth. Sam might look like a failure on the outside, but inside he's raw creativity. I'm not even sure if that makes sense, but that's how I felt.

Then he meets Solar Lonsky, the oddest character I've ever had the opportunity to meet, and everything spirals out of control. There's really no way I can express to you how this book reads. It's part noir, part satire, and entirely a look into the deepest parts of ourselves. Lonsky's quest takes Sam to some dark places. There is real mystery here. Real violence and real blood. Even some slightly awkward sex, if I'm being honest. It's like this book is all over the place but, magically, it all wraps back up into itself and creates a wonderful package.

The one fault I found, and it's very possible it's just me, was that the language Gordon uses is very over the top. I'm not generally a reader of mystery or noir, so I don't know if this is normal. It's just that the massive use of similes really grated on me after a while. I'll begrudgingly admit that it does set the tone. That's probably the reason for their use. I'm just being honest about my personal reading of this book.

It's not as though it kept me from enjoying the book overall and, quite honestly, I powered through Mystery Girl rather quickly! I wasn't expecting what I found between these pages, but I loved every minute of it. I'm glad I took a chance on David Gordon's book. I can't wait to seek out what he writes next.

Mystery Girl A Novel

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