The Gin Girl (Livingston Press, 2003)
A sultry Florida adventure complete with drug dealers, a hurricane, a snake woman selling and occasionally dispensing venom, this first novel offers plenty of setting and surprises. Set in northern Florida, which anyone familiar with Florida knows is not of Florida, just as Florida is not of the South, we follow a barmaid returning to her island home after hearing her dead father calling in a dream, “It’s time to come home, Mary.” And for her it is time, after several years of wandering America. But the tranquility of a homecoming and settling down aren’t in Mary’s cards, even though she does land a job at the bar her childhood sweetheart used to own, for she immediately becomes obsessed with learning the “facts,” about this sweetheart’s murder. But facts are slippery, especially when people want to hide them. And when people sorely want to hide them, searching can become dangerous….
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Praise for The gin girl
“A remarkable first novel.”
— The St. Petersburg Times
“The Gin Girl is like crossing that deep, languid stream into the land of milk and honey. This author writes with a hard bitten confidence comparable to Ernest Hemingway. And yet, in the Souther tradition of William Faulkner, she can knit together sentences that can take your breath.”
— Florida Today
“River Jordan writes about the relationship between people with the same richness, color, imagination, genuine drama, beauty, pain and sadness, in the same vivid way she writes about the heat and humidity and the landscape and the physical side of living. She makes you care about the people she writes about, even the ones you might not like, but more than that, she makes you see them. her literary spice rack has everything you need to put together a good book, and this was fun to taste.”
— Rick Bragg, author of All Over but the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man
“In The Gin Girl, River Jordan spins a true Florida tale, a multicultural spiritual journey from mystery and betrayal to final redemption. Wonderfully evocative, with razor sharp imagery, she paints Florida’s indigenous landscape in colors so real you can smell the salt marsh, and she introduces us to characters who are as haunted an dlovely and endangered as the land they cherish.”
— Janis Owens, author of My Brother Michael and The Schooling of Claybird Catts
“This debut novel has a leisurely pace and moody, offbeat rhythm that suits its characters and salt-marsh setting perfectly. It also builds towards a surprisingly effective twist at the end.”
— Hal Jacobs, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“With hints of Rick Bragg and James Lee Burke, River Jordan takes Southern elements and makes them all her own. She is an author to discover and continue enjoying.”
— Eric Wilson, author of Expiration Date and Dark to Mortal Eyes
“Jordan vividly evokes the steamy, tropical climate of Toliquilah, a Gulf Coast island in North Florida… The plot moves as slowly as the air in the swamps, but those who crave atmosphere rather than action will find much to savor in this humid thriller.”
— Booklist