Review by Booklist Review
Goldberg takes a break from his popular Eve Ronin series with this stand-alone featuring Beth McDade, a former LAPD detective who, after a professional disaster, has relocated to the small city of Barstow, California, in the hopes of resurrecting her career and finding some measure of peace. A pair of seemingly unrelated cases--an unidentified homeless man killed in a vehicular accident and a decades-old skeleton uncovered in a shallow grave--force Beth to reexamine her own life and to tackle head-on some aspects of her past she's been trying to keep hidden. Goldberg has a knack for crafting engaging characters with whom the reader establishes an immediate bond. Here, Beth's backstory will keep readers turning the page. And Goldberg's plots are always first-rate, but this one is especially suspenseful and surprising. Goldberg's fans will need no prompting to seek out this new book, but readers who have never read him will be richly rewarded, too.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest standalone from Goldberg (after Malibu Burning) is disappointingly void of the cleverness that animates his best work. Homicide detective Beth McDade lost her job with the LAPD after sleeping with a junior officer and ended up in Barstow, Calif., a backwater town in the Inland Empire with a bad reputation among law enforcement. After a long stretch of unsatisfying cases, McDade finally gets a challenge when a man is fatally stricken by an RV. The driver responsible claims that he was distracted by a lightning storm that no one else saw, which allegedly coincided with an explosion at a military base near the highway, and didn't see the victim, who ran in front of the RV screaming, until it was too late. The reason for those screams is just one of many mysteries pertaining to the victim, who was dressed in clothes from a century earlier and had dental work that appeared to date back to the late 19th century. It's an intriguing setup, and Goldberg keeps readers invested for a while, but the explanations McDade reaches are profoundly unsatisfying. Worse still is the lack of memorable characters. Even Goldberg's diehard fans will be disappointed. Agent: Amy Tannenbaum, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Beth McDade is an ex-LAPD detective, banished to the only California town that will accept her, Barstow, in the Mojave Desert. Afterhours are spent drinking and having sex, at least until Feb. 3, 2019. On Feb. 2, a terrified man runs in front of an RV and is killed. The coroner discovers that his clothes were made in the 1800s. Topping this, an extinct grizzly bear attacks a camper. Then there's the disappearance of Owen Slader, on his way from Las Vegas to LA. When his bones are found a week later, they appear to be over 100 years old. There's also the discovery of some sort of explosion at two local marine bases and a man's historical appearance out of nowhere in the mining town of Calico in 1882, but McDade is stonewalled when she asks questions about these events. While she digs into happenings that seem to make no sense, readers are clued in to what really happened to Slader, events that affect his descendants until 2019. VERDICT In an unusual mash-up, the author of the Eve Ronin books combines police procedural, Western historical, and time travel. An entertaining story for those who can suspend disbelief.--Lesa Holstine
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Hold onto your hats. A fatal but otherwise routine accident in rural California turns out to be not exactly either one. Fired from the LAPD over an affair with a junior officer, Beth McDade has to settle for working as a detective for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office in Barstow. The town has its share of burglaries and such, but Beth's latest case is something else entirely. A ghostly figure has appeared screaming out of thin air and run into the path of a mobile home outside Peggy Sue's in Yermo one stormy night. The dead man has no identifying papers, and the contents of his pockets all date from the 1880s. The weirdness is only intensified by the discovery of a skeleton that seems to be that of missing chef and food writer Owen Slader, even though pregnant coroner Amanda Selby identifies it as a century old despite its Tommy Bahama shirt and state-of-the-art dental and orthopedic implants. So what's going on here? Beth's increasingly bewildered inquiries lead her to focus on the history of the Calico silver mine, which flourished more than a century ago, and the possibility that the best place to get answers may be the nearby Marine Corps Logistics Base, whose security chief, Bill Knox, is another of Beth's ex-flings. The Marines, being Marines, aren't eager to enlighten her, and she's left searching for leads while the story follows Owen in the days before his remains are discovered, into worlds that will seriously challenge readers' suspension of disbelief even as they expand the boundaries of the police procedural in rip-roaring ways. If you have time for only one mystery, one Western, and one SF this year, this will ding all three targets. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
