Calico One of the Most Gripping and Twistiest Thrillers You’ll Read This Year

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author
BUCKLE UP FOR THE TWISTIEST THRILLER YOU WILL READ THIS YEAR.

'A genre-bending, gripping read' — Harlan Coben
'A mind-bending thriller unlike anything I have read before' — Linwood Barclay
'Could be Lee Goldberg's best ever' — Lee Child
'I guarantee you've never read a crime novel like it. The X Files meets Deadwood. Totally gripping' — Ian Rankin

A man walks into the path of an oncoming motor home in the Mojave Desert.
He's dressed like an 1880s miner. His bones are over a hundred years old.

Welcome to Barstow.

Detective Beth McDade was an LAPD homicide cop until she wasn't. Now she's working the graveyard shift in a town nobody chooses, and she has a body in Yermo she can't explain. The security camera caught the dead man running into traffic seconds after a flash of lightning that wasn't really lightning, more like something tearing a hole in the sky.
Days later, an LA food blogger vanishes off the same stretch of Interstate 15. The last footage of him alive shows him buying beef jerky at a gas station up the road.

When his skeleton turns up — a hundred years in the ground — and the dental records match the man on camera, Beth realises something out there in the desert is moving people through time.

And it's been doing it for a very long time.

Praise for Calico
'If you have time for only one mystery, one Western, and one SF this year, this will ding all three targets' — Kirkus Reviews
'Goldberg's plots are always first-rate, but this one is especially suspenseful and surprising' — Booklist
'A remarkably unconventional crime novel that is warm, thrilling, and fun to read' — Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
'A cleverly complex plot wreathed in Goldberg's brilliant humour makes this a rocket-paced story' — Historical Novels Review (Editors' Choice)
'A double-barrelled blast, melding the tense, edge-of-your-seat contemporary police procedural with a gritty 1880s Wild West tale' — The Roundup

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author

Lee Goldberg is an ex-Navy SEAL, nuclear physicist and a professional Daniel Craig impersonator.

Okay, that's not true. But he wants this biography to be really exciting, so pay attention. If things bog down, I've been instructed to add a car chase or some explicit sex.

Here's the real story. Lee Goldberg writes books and television shows.

His mother wanted him to be a doctor, and his grandfather wanted him to go into the family furniture business. Instead, he put himself through UCLA as a freelance journalist, writing for such publications as American Film, Starlog, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle (He also wrote erotic letters to the editor for Playgirl at twenty-five-dollars-a-letter, but he doesn't tell people about that, he just likes to boast about those "tiffany" credits).

He published his first book ".357 Vigilante" (as "Ian Ludlow," so he'd be on the shelf next to Robert Ludlum) while he was still a UCLA student. The West Coast Review of Books called his debut "as stunning as the report of a .357 Magnum, a dynamic premiere effort," singling the book out as "The Best New Paperback Series" of the year. Naturally, the publisher promptly went bankrupt and he never saw a dime in royalties. (But the books are available on the Kindle as "The Jury Series")

Welcome to publishing, Lee.

His subsequent books include the non-fiction books "Successful Television Writing" and "Unsold Television Pilots" ("The Best Bathroom Reading Ever!" San Francisco Chronicle) as well as the novels "My Gun Has Bullets" ("It will make you cackle like a sitcom laugh track," Entertainment Weekly), "Dead Space" ("Outrageously entertaining," Kirkus Reviews), "Watch Me Die" ("as dark and twisted as anything Hammet or Chandler ever dreamed up," Kirkus Reviews).

"Take me now," she moaned, "you hot writer stud."

She tore off her clothes and tackled him onto the floor, unable to control her raging lust. Nothing excited her more than being around a writer with a big list of books.

Got your attention again? Good. I don't know about you, but I was starting to nod off. Where was I? Oh yes...

Goldberg broke into television with a freelance script sale to "Spenser: For Hire." Since then, his TV writing & producing credits have covered a wide variety of genres, including sci-fi (SeaQuest), cop shows (Hunter, The Glades), martial arts (Martial Law), whodunits (Diagnosis Murder, Nero Wolfe), the occult (She-Wolf of London), kid's shows (R.L. Stine's The Nightmare Room), T&A (Baywatch), comedy (Monk) and utter crap (The Highwayman). His TV work has earned him two Edgar Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America.

His two careers, novelist and TV writer, merged when he began writing the "Diagnosis Murder" series of original novels, based on the hit CBS TV mystery that he also wrote and produced, and later wrote the 15 bestselling novels based on "Monk," another show that he worked on. He is co-creator of the hit Hallmark movie series "Mystery 101." He also he teamed up with Janet Evanovich to write the #1 New York Times bestselling Fox & O'Hare novels ("The Heist," "The Chase," "The Job," "The Scam," "The Pursuit"). His most recent books include "Movieland" (the 4th novel in the Eve Roninseries), "Malibu Burning" (the first novel in the Sharpe & Walker series) and the genre-bending thriller "Calico."

But perhaps he's best known for his pioneering work mapping the human genome and negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Goldberg lives in Los Angeles with his wife and his daughter and still sleeps in "Man From UNCLE" pajamas.