* Hollywood and Crime * Watch Me Die * The Walk * Dead Space * My Gun Has Bullets THE WALK t's one minute after the Big One. Marty Slack, a TV network executive, crawls out from under his Mercedes, parked outside what once was a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, the location for a new TV show. Downtown LA is in ruins. The sky is thick with black smoke. His cell phone is dead. The freeways are rubble. The airport is demolished. Buildings lay across streets like fallen trees. It will be days before help can arrive. Marty has been expecting this day all his life. He's prepared. In his car are a pair of sturdy walking shoes and a backpack of food, water, and supplies. He knows there is only one thing he can do ... that he must do: get home to his wife Beth, go back to their gated community on the far edge of the San Fernando Valley. All he has to do is walk. But he will quickly learn that it's not that easy. His dangerous, unpredictable journey home will take him through the different worlds of what was once Los Angeles. Wildfires rage out of control. Flood waters burst through collapsed dams. Natural gas explosions consume neighborhoods. Sinkholes swallow entire buildings. After-shocks rip apart the ground. Looters rampage through the streets. There's no power. No running water. No order. Marty Slack thinks he's prepared. He's wrong. Nothing can prepare him for this ordeal, a quest for his family and for his soul, a journey that will test the limits of his endurance and his humanity, a trek from the man he was to the man he can be ... if he can survive The Walk. Order the Kindle edition from Amazon. Order the trade paperback from Amazon. HIGH PRAISE "Harrowing and funny..."    —Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine "Lee Goldberg's hard-to-classify but not-be-missed The Walk, set in the aftermath of a major Los Angeles earthquake, pokes fun at the TV industry in the midst of disaster..."    —Jon Breen, The Year In Mystery and Crime Fiction 2004 "This is a magnificent novel—by turns hilarious, scary, sad, witty and ultimately wise on its judgments about the way so many of us live these days. And it's one hell of a page-turner, too."    —Ed Gorman, newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com (read the full review) "The Walk is one of the very best novels you'll read this year or any other year."    —James Reasoner, jamesreasoner.blogspot.com (read the full review) "The Walk is a book about what normal people would do in a life-or-death situation. What's remarkable, though, is that it also manages to incorporate all the fantasies we and our culture have had about those situations and consider what role they might play in our survival (or not). More than anything, it's a story that makes us confront the fact that most of the time most of us can't save the day—we can only save ourselves."    —The UNFANBOY "I think the best point was the fact that the main character was so realistic. He wasn't a hero. He didn't profess to be a hero... However, the author managed to still make you empathize with this character... Mr. Goldberg has done something very difficult in this book. He has made his main character unlikeable, then changed my mind by the end. The character development is just excellent."    —Red Adept Reviews "Lee Goldberg's novel, The Walk, is as much about the transformation of a man as it is about the ordeal he undergoes, and that is one reason it is so powerful. If anything, the interior life of the hero, Marty Slack, is as central to the novel as surviving a devastating quake that flattens Los Angeles. There are two themes, really: one is sheer survival in the chaos of the quake; the other is the effect this ordeal has on Slack. [...]By following the evolution of Marty Slack, and by putting Slack through an unimaginable ordeal in a shattered world, Lee Goldberg gives the novel a richness and truthfulness that wouldn't exist if it were only about a cardboard man fighting exterior threats. The story becomes far more poignant because it is about the hero's moral courage as much as it is about a paralyzed world. This is memorable fiction."    —Richard Wheeler, richardswheeler.blogspot.com (read the full review)