This book is incredibly boring and drawn out. Every time I got somewhat interested in one of the many storylines, it would abandon that storyline for several chapters. There were too many things to remember. I wasn’t even curious to keep reading. Would not recommend. I read 50%. The audiobook didn’t even help me to get interested.

I don’t like large books. For me, optimally, a novel should come in around 300 pages. Which means it doesn’t just take me longer to get through the larger books but it takes me longer to get TO them. And so, this novel, as enticing as it sounded, waiting on my Netgalley TBR list for quite a while. But…once I picked it up, I didn’t want to put it down. Yes, it’s over 400 pages, but it was well worth it for how fun, how engaging, how clever this mystery was.
I’m very selective with my thrillers, striving to avoid the clichéd work populating the market right now. This one isn’t clichéd at all.
My Dirty California is all original, a compelling mystery wrapped into a love song for a state of dreamers.
You get to follow a story of two estranged brothers, one as a ghostly presence lingering on the edges, one as a protagonist trying to solve his murder. It’s a maze of terrific characters and a plethora of concepts from crimes to conspiracy theories, all terrifically written and character driven.
Sun-baked, ocean-bathed, dirty yet so beguiling, California is the main character of this story and so much more than just a location.
The rest of the characters are no slouches either and are compelling in their own ways with their dramas and triumphs, conspiracy theories and crimes and complexly convoluted yet always engaging personal journeys.
You get aspiring criminals, aspiring detectives, aspiring dimension travelers. A real kitchen sink of a novel in the best possible way.
The mystery at the center of this novel is serpentine, clever, multi-layered, loaded with twists and surprises.
All in all, a great read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

I thought this sounded like a really fun premise with an intriguing cast of characters, but I couldn't hold momentum in the middle. Another case of a story being way too long for its own good lol. I did love the quick chapter length, I just thought it was a bit tedious.

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 30, 2022

My Dirty California that does not comfortably fit into a single genre. It seems to be a crime novel about multiple murders and a missing person or two until a character shows up who believes in the simulation hypothesis. She wants to leave her reality and cross into another, adding an element of science fiction to the story. Yet the character who believes in the simulation hypothesis might be mentally disturbed, so the story might be more psychological drama than science fiction. The murder mystery begins to intertwine with other crimes, although some time passes before the nature of those crimes becomes clear. Ultimately, the story reads like a thriller that moves forward on multiple fronts. Maybe it’s best not to worry about giving My Dirty California a label.

After being absent for a decade, Marty Morrel travels from California to Pennsylvania and walks back into the lives of his brother and father. Soon after he reappears, someone kills Marty and his father. Marty’s brother Jody is too late to save them, but he briefly chases the killer, a man he can only identify by the disparate lengths of the man’s legs. As he dies, Marty says something to Jody that sounds like “De Nada.”

During their brief time together before the murders, Marty told Jody that he had been documenting his experiences in videos he posted to a website he called My Dirty California. Some of the novel reads like a detective story as Jody tries to piece together clues buried in Marty’s videos that might explain his death.

Before his brother’s body is in the ground, Jody drives to California in search of the killer. Jody learns that Marty wandered and charmed, finding opportunities for short-term work everywhere he went. Marty met Renata while playing pick-up soccer. Renata told Marty she had been invited to a place called Pandora’s House, a haunted house that seems much larger on the inside than it does on the outside. Marty was supposed to see her again the next day but Renata disappeared.

Some of the novel follows Renata, including her backstory as a migrant who came across the border unlawfully and her strange adventures after visiting Pandora’s House. Jason Mosberg plants doubt about the true nature of Renata’s experiences is his effort to straddle the line between genres.

The last key character is Pen(elope), a documentary maker whose embrace of UFOs and the simulation hypothesis makes producers wary of working with her. Pen might be a nutcase but she might be right. The simulation hypothesis suggests that the reality in which we exist is actually a computer simulation. Elon Musk is an advocate of the simulation hypothesis, which might be a reason to reject it, but the idea does have some appeal. Whenever something happens that we can’t explain, a possible explanation is that the anomaly is a glitch in the computer program.

Pen not only identifies glitches, she believes that the glitches represent breaches in the simulated reality that allow travel between different simulations. Pandora’s House is, in her view, such a breach. Pen also attributes her father’s disappearance to his travel into a different simulation.

To make a documentary about the simulation hypothesis that nobody wants to produce, Pen hits on the idea of disguising her premise in a documentary about Marty’s disappearance. She thinks he went through a breach (he mentions Pandora’s House in a couple of videos), but she needs to investigate his California experience to advance the documentary. Her investigation coincides with Jody’s.

The story would be complex even without Pen and Renata. For much of the novel, the reader wonders whether Marty was killed because he was a bad guy. One of the people who knew Marty described him as “a free spirit trapped in a cage.” The bars of his cage were constructed from a moral code, making it unlikely that Marty was evil, although he may have found himself in the company of evil people. That ambiguity is one of many plot points that hold the reader’s interest.

The story is driven by linkage. One character links to another who links to a third who links to two more. Jody leads to Pen who leads to Tiphony and her imprisoned husband Mike who leads to the criminal at the center of the story. Marty’s blog leads Jody to Shiloh; Shiloh leads Pen to Nicole. Renata’s experience in Pandora’s House leads her to Coral. All of these characters play significant roles in a carefully constructed but free-wheeling story.

My Dirty California is marketed as a literary thriller. In the post-modernist literary world, it isn’t cool to leave a reader feeling satisfied with a story. Nor is it cool to allow a reader to become lost in a story. Post-modernism strips illusions away and prevents readers from using fiction to escape reality. All of that falls by the wayside in a novel that suggests reality as we perceive it might itself be an illusion. Even without the simulation hypothesis, there is no hint of post-modernism in My Dirty California. It is literary in the sense of being well-written, not in the tendency of literary fiction to emphasize characterization to the exclusion of plot. The novel is an exercise in traditional storytelling, the kind that recognizes the primacy of plot but doesn’t short-change character development or atmosphere.

With one exception, the ending ties up loose ends in a way that will please readers who feel an attachment to the surviving characters. The exception is Mosberg’s decision to let the reader’s imagination write an ending (or a continuation of the story) for one of the principal characters. My Dirty California might be a good choice for readers who embrace old-fashioned storytelling while remaining open to new ideas.

RECOMMENDED

This was written like a play and I just couldn’t finish it. It was fairly obvious it was written by someone more accustomed to writing for tv. I really wanted to be intrigues as a native Californian who was forced to leave for med school lol

"I love this state, I really do. Yet, at times, California feels like something hip someone in marketing tried to fit in a bottle to sell. California is the kind of place that can make a person who doesn’t care about flowers care about wildflowers. But there’s a dark history below California’s undeniably beautiful surface. A dark history with how its destiny manifested. Japanese internment. The LA riots. The California Alien Land Law of 1913. The Mexican-American War. Facebook. Sometimes I think California never left the gold rush era. Gold was merely substituted with other treasure to chase. Movies. Fame. Waves. Venture capital. Youth. Wine. Love. Spirituality. Technology. I guess I’m part of the everlasting, ever-changing rush."
--------------------------------------
"When I first moved to LA, I realized no one here goes bowling. There’s too much to do. Marty Morrel did it all. He explored every inch of the city of LA, every crack and crevice of the state of California, and it’s all documented in hundreds of videos, thousands of pictures, and scores of essays and journal entries. Even if there hadn’t been any crimes, I think I would have wanted to make a podcast about Marty. But there were crimes. I thought murders would be the most disturbing part of this podcast, but that was before I learned about Pandora’s House." - from a fictional, unaired podcast

As you can see, My Dirty California opens with a fun, noir narration. The sensibility persists, although there is no troubled detective or PI asking uncomfortable questions, drinking too much, and getting beaten up. After that opening bit, Mosberg leaves the boundless beauty (the clean aspect?) of the state to other writers. This is today’s off-the-tourist-map California, violence, murder, drugs, trafficking, scams, surfer dudes, documentary film-making, outrageous, long-lasting parties, portraits of some Cali subcultures, a bit of mental illness, sleuthing, sex (only a little) and some serious other-worldly notions. There are LOLs to be had here, and even some tears. Jody, Pen, Tish and Renata are all searching for something, and Marty Morrel is at the center of it all.

Unfortunately for Marty he is not around, as he becomes late early on. After a ten-year hiatus he returned to his home near Lancaster, PA, where his father and brother, Jody, live. Soon after, a hooded gunman killed him, for reasons unknown, and his father, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But before his demise, he had clued Jody in to a project he had been working on

“I’ve been making this thing. I don’t really know what it is yet. It’s called My Dirty California.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s a website. But it’s really just a place I’ve been doing a . . . project. I didn’t even know what it was at first. I wasn’t trying to define it. Eventually it kinda became a video log, about my adventures or whatever. A place to store all the pictures I take. And I kept up with it. Posting these videos online.”
“So it’s a blog.”
“No,” Marty says…“It’s more a place I can store all these photos and videos and essays till I figure out what to do with the project. Maybe at some point I’ll edit them into a documentary or a piece of long-form web video art.”

When Jody decides to heads out to LA to find out what Marty was up to, what got him killed, that collection is his starting point, along with letters and postcards his brother had sent home. Jody is not the only person availing of Marty’s trove.

Penelope Rhodes is a documentary film maker. She’d had some success with an earlier film about a UFO, which gets her several meetings about her new project. The driving force of her life is finding her father, who vanished when she was a kid. However, this is a search with a difference. Pen has a rather peculiar idea of what may have happened to him, involving Matrix-like simulations. Don’t ask. She is fixated on finding a particular place, Pandora’s House, where she believes it might be possible to move from this simulation (the one we are all living in) to another, where her father might be. This obsession has made getting by in this simulation rather a challenge. In her explorations, she comes across Marty’s vast materials, and follows the clues wherever they lead, or wherever she imagines they might lead.

Typhony Carter is young, married, with one son. She works cleaning houses, but cannot get enough work to keep her family afloat. Her husband, Mike, is a dedicated father. But when they go to a rally about cops killing yet another black teen, Mike gets into it with a counter-protester and winds up in jail. Times get even tougher, so when a scheme appears, that involves finding a hoard of art, supposedly secreted away by a recently deceased collector/dealer, she takes on the mission.

Renata, 19, travels from Mexico to the USA hoping for a better life, not, of course, through the legal channels. There is a contact in LA who can help her, a family friend. But things do not go to plan and Renata winds up trying to survive an abduction. Marty had been trying to find out what happened to her. Now there are others looking as well.

The POV alternates among Jody, Pen, Renata, and Typh. Jody is our driving force, where we spend the most time. There are 89 chapters in the book. Jody gets 31, then Pen, 24, Renata, 18, and Typh, 16. The chapters are short, so the four stories move along at a lively clip, clearly a product of a screenwriter’s appreciation of pacing

It also makes it possible to read this whenever you have small bits of available time, if that is something you like to do.

Since this is California, wheeled transportation figures large. Almost all the characters are assigned an auto-trait, like hair or eye color, or age. Jody, for example, drives a gray pickup. Pen drives a Prius. People are tracked, as well as defined, by the cars they drive. There is an Acura, an Accord, an old Lexus sedan, a Ford Focus, even a Tesla, and plenty more. I only started keeping track part way through. It is a small, fun element. There are appealing. surprising cameos by a range of wild creatures. These include a kangaroo, a wobbegong shark, and a jaguar. The notion of moving from one reality to another is given a look beyond Pen’s particular take on it.

Mosberg offers sly commentary on local sub-cultures. He looks a bit at how good intentions are used for dark ends. One thing to be aware of, different characters are on unparallell timelines, although those timelines do intersect. Characters in adjoining chapters could be doing what they do months apart. I found it a wee bit disconcerting at first, as actual dates are not provided, but one soon gets used to it.

Character engagement – Jody is righteous, on an understandable truth-seeking quest. His motivation makes sense and he is easy to pull for. Pen is also on a quest, although it remains to be seen for us whether there is enough reality basis there for us to go all in with her. Wanting to find your lost father may be a noble ambition, but she may just be nuts. Pandora’s House may be just another conspiracy theory (she nurtures loads of those) Makes it a bit tougher to go all in for her emotionally. Renata is an innocent soul, a pure victim, beset by dark forces, just wanting a better life. But is there enough more about her in here to make us care beyond wanting her to escape? Typh is a decent sort, although, in order to provide for her family, she is willing to go legally and morally rogue. So, depending on what works for ya, you may find one or more of these four worthy of following. I enjoyed the weaving together of the strands, as they all continue to connect through Marty’s storehouse of intel.

There is a considerable cast of supporting actors. Two thuggish sorts were a particular delight, a source of considerable merriment. There are occasional bits in which this character or that is presented in a bit more depth, but that is not what this book is about. It is about the story, and, of course, the state.

Bottom line for me was that I really loved this book. It kept me interested, offered enough characters to care about, gave a peek into places and groups I have never experienced, in short it kept me entertained for the duration. You may or may not ever find your way to Pandora’s House, but you should have no trouble finding your way to a copy of My Dirty California.

“Various rumors exist about Pandora’s House. Some people say the architect Zaha Hadid was paid eight figures to design a top secret underground property in Southern California but she had to sign an NDA, and no one knows where it is. Another rumor suggests the Church of Scientology began building a two-hundred-million-dollar bunker but abandoned the project halfway through and sold the property to a couple millennials whose parents had made billions in the dot-com era, and they use the house to throw elaborate weeklong parties. Some say it’s where the notorious lizard people live underground. Other people say the house was constructed by the US government as a safe house for the top one percent in the case of an apocalyptic event.”
“Has anyone actually seen the house?” asks Matt.
“Lots of people claim to have. It’s difficult to know for sure.


Review posted – September 23, 2022

Publication date – August 30, 2022


I received an DRC (digital review copy) of My Dirty California from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and surrendering certain tapes that had come into my possession. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

For the full review, please head on over to my site, Coot's Reviews - https://cootsreviews.com/2022/09/23/my-dirty-california-by-jason-mosberg/

Jody is living with his father in Pennsylvania when his long-lost brother returns home from California. Two days later, his brother and father are murdered, and Jody heads to Los Angeles to find out why.

Pen is a documentary filmmaker convinced everyone is living in a simulation and is searching for an escape portal.

Renata is an undocumented immigrant trapped in a windowless room with walls that mysteriously glow.

Tiph is a young mother with a husband in prison and a plan to steal a stolen art stash.

MY DIRTY CALIFORNIA manages to plot these intersecting storylines into a unique literary thriller. It kept me on my toes and turning pages. Was it a thriller? Sci-fi? Did unreliable narrators surround me? I had no idea how it would end.

Bonus: Jody takes a road trip through the state, checking off places his brother recommended. I smiled when he named places I remembered from our seven years living on the Central Coast.

"This is Jody. My first entry. I'm going to use my brother's website to keep track of all this . . . "

Marty, the prodigal son, returns to his home town after a ten-year absence. Too bad someone followed him, and two days later . . . he's a corpse. His older brother, Jody, studies Marty's vlog looking for clues as he heads to California in search of the real killer.

The writing is quite good here, but Mosberg's plot is INVOLVED to the point of being CONVOLUTED. And, although the story is intriguing, my interest began to cool at the halfway point. The ending, however, was satisfying enough to bring my rating up to four stars.

With a little tightening, this one will make one hell of a mini-series.

Be prepared to binge watch . . .

Thank you to the publisher & Netgalley for an advanced reader copy of this book in return for an honest review.
Marty returns to his childhood home to reunite with family. The suspense takes a twist when Jody, his brother, leaves briefly and comes back to see that his father was murdered and his brother was in serious condition. They were both shot with the gunman fleeing. Jody takes up the task to search for the killer after seeing Marty's blog and has the idea that the blog, along with Jody's clue finding, will help Jody track down the killer.
enjoyed the mystery and the suspense part of this book.
What I did not enjoy was the rambling and on and on from different characters. There are a lot of theories intertwined in the story that had me confused, but overall it was an enjoyable book.
Read from: Sep 01, 2022 - Sep 09, 2022

When Jodi’s father and brother Marty are murdered, Jodi travels to California and tries to piece together the motive for the crime by using Marty’s blog called My Dirty California. The story is told through several groups of characters who eventually intersect. There is a documentary filmmaker who thinks we are all part of a simulation, a Mexican immigrant and some people trying to become art thieves. There is also human trafficking and drug dealing, and Jodi is diagnosed with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which adds nothing useful to the story).

The author is a screenwriter and TV creator who probably wants this book developed into a TV series. It might work better that way than it does as as a book. There are too many characters and too much plot in this book. And it doesn’t help that the chronology is jumbled. It was all just overdone but it did hold my interest.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Marty hasn't been around in a while-- a very long while, so when Marty shows up at the family home, Jody doesn't know how to feel about it. When Jody finds his brother and father murdered e makes the decision to find out who did it, and what their motive was. The journey leads him to California, where he discovers his brother's website called My Dirty California and uses it to help him find the clues he needs. Jody is introduced to the LA lifestyle and friends he never thought he would be introduced to. His search into Marty's death also leads to him coming into his own, solving a major crime while also figuring out just what it is he wants out of life.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mosberg takes you on a wild ride through California. I couldn't help but continue to read, saying " one more chapter...just one more" It was so good.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
"My Dirty California" by Jason Mosberg was a very complicated, fascinating, bizarre & interesting story.
I loved how the author used multiple perspectives & timelines from the 4 main characters to tell the story.
I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for the author's future books.

Jody uses his brother Marty's vlog- My Dirty California - to try to find the man who murdered Marty and their father at the family home in Pennsylvania. This unusual blend of mystery, suspense, and science fiction is not really about the murder (although it is), it's about the people Jody meet during his quest. All of them are also looking for something. Pen, Renata, and Tiphony all run along the underside of the state that so fascinated Marty. This gets a little weird in spots, especially wrt Pen, who supplies some of the more questionable parts (portals and so on). It's not straightforward at all and very character driven. Jody, for example, has OCPD and makes lists. I suspect this won't be for everyone as it sprawls and occasionally loses its way (depending on what you think the way is) but it's an interesting read that takes a hard look at California (duh). Thanks the publisher for the ARC. A mice debut.

This stunningly original novel is being labeled a “literary thriller” but I think that’s doing a disservice to the genre-bending nature of this smart, sensitive tale, that follows four protagonists in desperate search of solutions. Our main character is Jody Morrel, whose younger brother Marty comes home to Pennsylvania after a decade of living in California. The original move had left the brothers somewhat estranged despite their once closeness, a distance propelled just as much by Marty’s peripatetic lifestyle as by Jody’s own mental health issues:

QUOTE
The doctor diagnosed Jody with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), which she explained was different from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The symptoms include an excessive devotion to work that impairs social or family activities, excessive fixation with lists, rigid following of ethical codes, extreme frugality without reason, and hoarding. She started Jody on antianxiety meds he’s been taking ever since. Over the course of ten sessions, she steered Jody toward trying to avoid jobs and activities he might obsess over. Jody remembers laughing about the advice in one of the few lighter moments of the therapy sessions. <i>Just avoid following your passions!</a>
END QUOTE

The brothers are barely beginning to readjust to one another when Marty and their dad are brutally murdered. The local cops have no leads, but Jody is convinced that what happened must have had something to do with what Marty had been up to on the west coast, particularly in relation to the secret website Marty had told him about. My Dirty California is the name of a multimedia journal and travelog Marty had been using to chronicle his travels across the Golden State. Jody is sure that a clue must be buried somewhere within the years of entries, and travels west with the website as his guide. His OCPD makes him the perfect, tenacious investigator to sift through this overabundance of information in order to get to the bottom of what might have gotten Marty and his dad so violently and senselessly killed.

In this endeavor Jody finds a series of unlikely allies. First and foremost is Pen Rhodes, the documentary filmmaker who has been obsessed with finding out how to escape the simulation (yes, a la The Matrix) she believes she lives in ever since her father disappeared some years past. Her latest lead involves the concept of an iceberg house, as she explains in a pitch to prospective producers:

QUOTE
“Iceberg houses are houses where you can only see ten percent and ninety percent of the house is below ground.”

They nod, intrigued, as Pen keeps going.

“Various rumors exist about Pandora’s House. Some people say the architect Zaha Hadid was paid eight figures to design a top secret underground property in Southern California but she had to sign an NDA, and no one knows where it is. Another rumor suggests the Church of Scientology began building a two-hundred-million-dollar bunker but abandoned the project halfway through and sold the property to a couple millennials whose parents had made billions in the dot-com era, and they use the house to throw elaborate weeklong parties. Some say it’s where the notorious lizard people live underground.[”]
END QUOTE

Her search leads her to Marty’s website, through which she eventually joins forces with Jody to unravel the tangled maze of clues and corruption that obscures the end of Marty’s life. Along the way, their paths cross with those of Tiphony, a young mom struggling to make a better future for herself and her family, and Renata, another young woman chasing the American dream while evading exploitation at every turn. Their narratives seem to float through time and space till each protagonist, satisfyingly, finds the ending they deserve.

I was completely blown away by this novel, which felt equal parts Joan Didion and Mark Z Danielewski (even before the clever shout-out in the text,) with strong Kate Atkinson vibes throughout. Our protagonists are flawed and scrappy and utterly sympathetic as they fight against the criminal conspiracies that threaten to destroy their lives. With references not only to sci-fi staples but also to more recent Internet horror memes – in addition to very current political and legal issues – this is an of-the-moment novel that deserves to find a wide audience in anyone who enjoys smart books that, like real life, eschew narrow classifications in order to shrewdly and bravely face the challenges of the present day.

Thanks to the good folks at NetGalley for the chance to read an ARC of this book.

It is bizarre and very much not for me.

Well written through of twists and turns.A unique page turner kept me guessing till the last page.The California setting kept my interest.Will be recommending the book and the author.#netgalley #simon& schuster

Huh. This is much more than a character trying to retrace his brother's steps to find out who murdered his brother and their father. The main character has OCPD which manifests as a compulsion to make lists, and goes to California to follow his brother's meanderings and comes into contact with all sorts of strange and kooky characters.

Hands down this is my favorite book of 2022 (so far). Jason Mosberg brings an authentic version of California to the pages through characters with unique backstories and personalities. The entire plot seems completely unique while still tackling familiar subject matter. His writing shows an acute attention to detail. From the way Californians say "the" before the highway number down to diners you can find near California state parks. This book offers a new play on the multiple point of view mysteries that seem to be everywhere but also seem to be the same. The reader is slowly introduced to each character and each of them is on their own personal journey to find what the need in life. Jody wants answers about his brother’s death, Pen wants the truth, Tiph wants the best for her family, and Renata wants a better life. Somehow these lives that seem separate become woven together in the underbelly of California. This is one of those books where the jacket blub doesn’t do it justice but rewards the ones that take the risk.
I recommend this book for anyone that likes revenge tales, mysteries, light science fiction, smuggling, heists, escape stories and a little bit of social commentary.

There are too many things to keep up with in this book. Changes in timeframe, characters, storyline, even genre. Is it a thriller? Is it science fiction? And it is TOO LONG. It was hard to stay invested in the characters when reading for hours only gets you through 1o chapters and you realize you have 79 more chapters to go.

If you are looking for a good book to read this summer then you can't do much better than My Dirty California by Jason Mosberg. It is a suspenseful and gritty. I found myself not wanting to stop reading to find out where this was going. It is really engaging and perfect for a summer read.