For more than 20 years, Tod Goldberg has guided readers on a literary journey to the dark side of crime in desert noir fiction that spans the Salton Sea to Nevada. His Gangsterland novels, including 2023’s Gangsters Don’t Die, are essential additions to a noirish gangster subgenre that dates back to the 1920s; the subgenre was epitomized by Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and carried on by recent novels like Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy. But unlike Puzo’s or Winslow’s, Goldberg’s fiction, honed on five earlier Burn Notice adaptations, has increasingly taken on a darkly comic vein à la Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen.
In Only Way Out, a stand-alone novel, Goldberg expands his horizons, both geographically and thematically. He moves the action to Granite Shores, Oregon, which 15 years ago was so dead it was dubbed “Losertown.” Nearby is a treacherous and tragic gulch named for the Patterson family, who disappeared in 1848 during a snowstorm and whose only surviving member, 11-year-old Yeach, emerged from the gulch with a harrowing account of eating the family dogs and, eventually, his kinfolk.
Goldberg deserves wider acclaim as a practitioner of the long con novel, as much for the meticulousness with which he sets up the reader with vital front-loaded world-building like the Patterson Gulch yarn as for the intricate grifts his antiheroes execute as a result of it. Here, as the novel opens, the grifter-in-chief is Jack Biddle, a joint-toking cop trying to outrun childhood friend Danny Vining over $200,000 in gambling debts and a sordid history. Jack’s hiding out on Yeach Mountain from Bobby C., one of Danny’s collection minions; he’s hoping that a Canadian tourist comes through the pass whom he can shake down for their drugs. Meanwhile, he dreams of turning Yeach Patterson’s family tragedy into an annual summer festival. In this bent cop’s THC-addled brain, that will drive business and construction, increase property values, and turn Losertown into a real destination. “Amp up the crazy,” is Jack’s motto.
Fair to say it’s Goldberg’s too. What Biddle witnesses instead are the last moments on earth of Robert Green, a low-level employee at Barer & Harris, a Seattle law firm. Robert’s failure to pass the Washington State bar exam 16 times has relegated him to cataloging and overseeing access to 324 safe-deposit boxes in the firm’s high-security vault. Broke and discouraged, Robert’s only perceived way out is to load up his Econoline van with the boxes—full of ill-gotten cash, jewelry, and incriminating evidence the firm holds in confidence for its nefarious clients—and head south to Granite Shores as part of an escape plan he’s hatched with his sister, Penny. (More about her later.) En route, Robert’s van skids on black ice. It flies into Patterson Gulch, where a huge evergreen tree severs the van in half and removes Robert’s head from his body.
Readers will be served well to pay close attention to these whacked-out early chapters. They contain the heart of the long cons that Robert and Penny are working from one wrong side of the law and Jack from the other. Penny is a certifiable genius but, disastrously, also likes to beat up people and work for crooked casino owners with American names but Cyrillic passports. She’s outfitted and docked their deceased father’s boat at the Granite Shores marina to receive cash and jewelry from the boxes Robert is transporting before she and her brother plan to hightail it to Ecuador.
The scheme goes haywire when Robert is decapitated by that tree on Yeach Mountain. Once Jack discovers the loot and the plans, he makes Robert a real evergreen by dismantling the evidence and stashing the deceased’s remains beneath his family’s long-shuttered sno-cone shop. When Penny starts looking for her brother, she runs into Jack, who rightly pins the heist on her and the long-gone Robert, which enables him to operationalize the siblings’ blackmail scheme.
Fifteen years later, Penny’s out of prison. Robert, of course, is still missing, but his legend has grown to rival D.B. Cooper’s, thanks to Biddle’s “heroism” and his cousin Addie’s true-crime podcast. “Losertown” Granite Shores has been transformed into an upscale destination for conspiracy tourism, which catapults Jack’s wife from the city council to mayor and Jack to a promotion as Granite Shores’ police chief.
Enter Mitch Diamond, from Barer & Harris. A man with a murky past and sordid work history, Mitch had been sent to Granite Shores on a gangster’s errand at the time of Robert’s death, just before he stepped into the job as chief of security and chief fixer at B&H. Outside of the routine intimidations he’s asked to perform there, Mitch’s other job is to quietly pay off the sender of the anonymous (but assumed to be Robert’s) blackmail letters sent to the firm’s shadier clients. But 15 years in, Mitch intercepts a letter that compels him to return to Granite Shores to find Robert Green. The chaos and mayhem that ensue sweep up Mitch, Penny, cousin Addie, and Chief Biddle, as well as a wide assortment of gangsters and their henchmen from strip clubs and casinos in Granite Shores and far beyond.
Goldberg is a consummate pro at juggling the backstories and present actions of his multivarious cast of losers without robbing them of their humanity or the overarching sadness the reader feels about their dead-end plights and schemes. Other targets of Goldberg’s shiv-sharp wit are the trajectory of true-crime podcasts in American culture and, most poignantly, the gentrification of the West Coast’s small towns and the resulting collective loss.
Mitch Diamond is the man to watch in the novel, a worthy contemporary of the best of Elmore Leonard’s criminal antiheroes. With his simple moral code and keen eye for skulduggery, his talents are on full display when he first arrives in Granite Shores: “He found himself in a sun-dappled village called Granite Park filled with diagonal parking, artisan ice cream shops, too much green space, and women in Juicy tracksuits pushing strollers and sipping from Starbuck’s cups. It felt like a Meg Ryan movie from the 90s, but not the one Mitch saw. Everything was a shade of J. Crew.” And as the town continues to morph into “an out-of-season Hallmark Christmas movie,” readers will be left to ponder who really wins, and at whose expense, when we strive for what self-serving people like Jack call progress.
Violent, hilarious, and thought-provoking by turns, Only Way Out is a humdinger of a crime novel that further cements Goldberg’s reputation as an heir to Leonard or Hiaasen even as he broadens and amplifies his own endearingly sardonic vision of the West.•
Paula L Woods is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, an editor, and the author of the Charlotte Justice mysteries.
