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    Mystery Girl: A Novel
    Mystery Girl: A Novel
    Mystery Girl: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Mystery Girl: A Novel

    Written by David Gordon

    Narrated by Luke Daniels

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When Sam Kornberg’s wife, Lala, walks out on him, he’s an unemployed used-book store clerk and failed experimental novelist with a broken heart. Desperate to win her back, he takes a job as assistant detective to the enigmatic Solar Lonsky, a private eye who might be an eccentric and morbid genius or just a morbidly obese madman.

    It’s a simple tail job, following a beautiful and mysterious lady around L.A., but Sam soon finds himself helplessly falling for his quarry and hopelessly entangled in a murder case involving Satanists, succubi, underground filmmakers, Hollywood bigshots, Mexican shootouts, video-store geekery, and sexy doppelgangers from beyond the grave. A case that highlights the risks of hardcore reading and mourns the death of the novel—or perhaps just the decline of Western Civilization.

    Mystery Girl is a thriller about the dangers of marriage and a detective story about the unsolvable mysteries of love, art, and other people.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJul 16, 2013
    ISBN9781469283630
    Mystery Girl: A Novel
    Author

    David Gordon

    David Gordon was born in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, publishing, and pornography. His first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU/Cabell First Novel Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Purple, and Fence among other publications.

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    Reviews for Mystery Girl

    3.5/5

    22 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 5/5
      Good story & characters, but the narrator was 5 stars. Moved seamlessly from voice to voice.
      Wonderful Job. First Rate!
    • 4/5
      It would be very easy not to like this book. It is over the top in every way imaginable--in sex, in violence, in pretentiousness. The story just keeps on growing and growing, but the author's voice and the interesting characters manage to hold it together despite the bloat, which is perhaps appropriate, given the presence of the grossly obese detective Solar Lonsky, who serves as sort of a pivot point for all the story's machinations. The settings--LA, Mexico, and the California desert--are also a part of the story's appeal. I wouldn't exactly want to read another story as overblown as this one from Mr. Gordon, but I will definitely investigate his other work.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Endlich gibt es mal wieder einen neuen Krimihelden auf dem Markt (wobei Held eindeutig übertrieben ist), der ebenso wie seine MitstreiterInnen weitestgehend klischeefrei daherkommt. Eigentlich ist er, Sam Kronberg, nämlich ein Loser. Seit Jahren schreibt er Bücher, die kein Mensch lesen will und schlägt sich trotz seines Studiums mit Aushilfsjobs durch, was ihn jedoch keineswegs verdrießt. Doch als seine über alles geliebte Frau Lala ihm erklärt, dass sie ihn aufgrund seiner 'Antriebslosigkeit' verlässt (er ist der Mann, er sollte das Geld nach Hause bringen, nicht sie!), heuert er als Assistenzdetektiv bei Solar Lonsky an, einem unglaublich intelligenten wie auch unglaublich fetten Paranoiker. Sein erster Fall scheint sich für Sam ganz gut zu entwickeln, bis sich die von ihm zu überwachende Frau von einem Balkon in den Tod stürzt...
      Wer an Krimis die (vermeintliche) Realitätsbezogenheit schätzt, wird mit diesem Buch nicht glücklich werden. Sowohl der Großteil der Figuren wie auch die dargestellten Milieus wirken derart überzogen, dass sich viele wohl kaum vorstellen können, dass so etwas tatsächlich existiert, wie beispielsweise das Filmpublikum einer besonderen Erstaufführung: "...eine krude Mischung aus einer Dungeon-and-Dragons-Convention, der Dreißigjahrfeier der High Times und einem Gipfeltreffen von Black-Metal-Clans." Kampfszenen arten mehr oder weniger in Gemetzel aus (amputierte Finger, die in Nasen gesteckt werden) und die zur Zeit überall vorkommenden, beliebten Erotikszenen grenzen hier schon eher an Pornographie. Dazu kommen eine Menge ungewöhnlicher Situationen, die sich hier nur schwierig wiedergeben lassen (und mich beim Lesen immer wieder grinsen ließen) und ein wirklich äusserst mysteriöser Todesfall. Kurzum: Das Buch ist schräg, schrill, komisch, eklig, er- und aufregend - mir hat's gefallen ;-)
    • 4/5
      Gordon has written two novels that I know about. In each the main character is a failed or failing novelist with characteristics that range from gullible to gleefully, monstrously domineering. What am I supposed to think? About halfway through this second novel, [stomping about in rubber boots] deep in descriptions of satanic porn films, I get the distinct impression I am in some kind of weird therapy session—but not for me. ”In A Difficulty in The Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917). Freud introduces the concept of the Third Wound to describe the repeated assaults that scientific knowledge had inflicted on human conceit: first, Copernicus discovered that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that man is not in fact the true center of the universe. The second blow was delivered by Darwin: man is not set apart from the animals, not formed by a creator in His image, but is in fact a creature among others, a variation on a theme, and no longer the center of life on earth either. The final, vanquishing blow, was of course Freud’s own: his discovery of the unconscious—that immense internal sea, full of fears and wishes, memories and fantasies, whose depths remain largely unsounded—revealed the truth, that our inner world is as alien as the universe without.” Amen to that.

      Gordon could probably write anything he wanted but he decided to write a mystery novel centered on a beautiful, sexy, and mysterious mixed-race woman who, after copulating with our narrator, disappears. I am not kidding. I am not going to tell you what to think about that, but he does spend much of the book alternately dreaming about her and looking for her. Along the way we get deep in [his subconscious] Black Arts films and murders and arson.

      And oh, by the way, his wife is also beautiful, sexy, mysterious, and mixed race, and she has disappeared also. And no wonder. Our failed novelist, whose taste in literature has devolved to the “funny, violent, dirty, and fast…[of] crime novels, newspaper, fashion magazines, comics and porn” serves only as breeding material but not as provider or protector. It seems he doesn’t have the goods to hold onto a wench of her proportions.

      “Why can’t you write normal stories, that people want to read?” queries one of the several mixed-race babes that our unpublished novelist fantasizes about: “Why not write regular realistic stories?” Ah, but life is not realistic, our novelist argues. “Does your life have a plot?” Does time shift and “does the past erupt into the present?” Good point.

      But the argument continues, this time from another character: “Let’s face it. No one was ever going to read [your novels.] People need hope and comfort. Real stories that give them a sense of meaning. Boring books like yours just upset and confuse people…” The novelist concedes this character critic has a point, but concludes that one has “to do something to fill one’s time on this planet,” and since he would not do well doing anything else, some “suicidal car salesman or lonely oncologist…would come across something I wrote in a dusty, bankrupt used bookshop, and recognize the message I left just for them…”

      Well, maybe not just for me, but I get the gist. And I like it. I like him. I like this writing. He’s crazy, and funny, and has some very strange tastes in movies, but sitting in on a therapy session with him, just me and the page, is a little like watching a peep show of the human heart…its weird desires and fears. We have here a man, a novelist, at his most vulnerable. He is published but not yet “successful” in the commercial sense. And he insists on telling us how it feels. It sounds pretty realistic to me.

      Keep your eyes on David Gordon. He is sui generis.