ONLY WAY OUT

A scuffling Seattle lawyer’s scheme to abscond with his firm’s safe deposit boxes has deadly consequences.

It’s 15 years ago. Half a million in debt, Robert Green uses his access as manager of the safe deposit boxes to remove them and pile them into his van, with plans of extorting clients with the unaccounted-for cash and sensitive documents in the boxes. His plan is to escape to South America with his sister, Penny, a SoCal desert-dweller whose genius IQ made her a child celebrity before she spent 14 years in prison for robbery and assaulting a cop. But his van spins off a mountain road, killing and decapitating him. His body, along with the ill-gotten loot—and his head—are discovered by Jack Biddle, the morally compromised, drug-using top cop of Granite Shores, a shabby Oregon beach town. While taking credit for cracking the safe-deposit case, he takes possession of the loot (he owes nefarious sorts a ton of money), claiming that Green disappeared with it. He thus leaves the town thinking for years that the daring thief, a hometown boy, is still alive. Flash forward to the present, when the now-legendary, media-friendly case has turned Granite Shores into a slickly gentrified destination spot—one where Penny’s nervy cousin Addie, a podcast queen, spins conspiracy theories about the local cops. “Every new dumb thing I say creates a financial ecosystem,” she says. The novel is a nice geographical shift for Goldberg—known for capturing the seedy essence of Las Vegas and the Salton Sea in Gangsterland (2014) and The Low Desert (2021), respectively—who does an uncanny job of keeping multiple plot elements in the air, shifting among unholy alliances of mobsters and do-gooders turned bad with cutting humor. Warped family histories, the trivializing effects of social media, and an occasional jab of emotion are all in the mix. “To not have hope was acutely freeing,” thinks Penny, whose words linger more than they should.

Internecine noir, done just right.