Calico

The book starts out innocuously enough with ex-LAPD detective Beth McDade investigating an accident but quickly swirls into a complex story of the now and then. And the strange thing is the past seems to be twisted tight with the present as the reader is treated to a scintillating historical and a contemporary mystery all at the same time with the ending bringing these two genres together in a satisfying and rewarding manner.

Calico presents a clever twist on time-travel plots, melding the Old West with present-day L.A. The writing is clear and engaging, the characters are well-developed, and the book is just plain funny over and over. Most interesting to me was the way the author gives a sense of what the Old West might really have been like—smelly, really smelly, with sewage in the streets, bad food, and a lack of simple things we take for granted, such as antibiotics and painkillers.

As a writer, you come up with a lot of ideas, and some of them don’t fit the mold.

The message is usually not to mix genres. But in his new book, Calico, Lee Goldberg melds a police procedural with an old-fashioned western, and created an explosive time-travel thriller everyone’s going to want to read. 

Any Goldberg novel entertains, but this one will blow your mind.