Sunset City - Melissa Ginsburg

Twenty-two-year-old
Charlotte Ford reconnects with Danielle, her best friend from high
school, a few days before Danielle is found bludgeoned to death in a
motel room.
In the wake of the murder, Charlotte's life unravels and
she descends into the city's underbelly, where she meets the strippers,
pornographers and drug dealers who surrounded Danielle in the years they
were estranged.

Ginsburg's Houston is part of a lesser known
south, where the urban and rural collide gracelessly.
In this shadowy
world, culpability and sympathy blur in a debut novel which thrillingly
brings its three female protagonists to the fore. Scary, funny and
almost unbearably sad, Sunset City
is written with rare grace and empathy holding you transfixed, praying for some kind of escape for Charlotte.