Tod Goldberg is grinning, eager to tell me about the ashes of a rock star’s mother. He won’t let me print the rocker’s name — “I’ll get in trouble,” he warns — but that detail isn’t important anyway. What matters is that these ashes have been sitting for decades in a law firm’s safe deposit box, tucked away with all the other things the wealthy and powerful don’t want the feds to see.
Goldberg first heard about these boxes from a relative working at the firm. “White-collar firms have them because the feds can’t get in. It’s all covered by attorney-client privilege,” he says.
Then he leans across his latte, eyes gleaming, and lays it out. “You could put a stuffed animal full of cocaine in there,” he says, half incredulous, half delighted by the sheer audacity of the loophole.
Out of that bizarre anecdote came Only Way Out, a black comic noir about bad people making even worse decisions, with those safe deposit boxes at the center of the story. The novel marks the latest release from the Indio-based Goldberg — a New York Times bestselling author and director of the low-residency MFA program at the UC Riverside, Palm Desert Campus — and will be published Dec. 1 by Thomas & Mercer, Amazon’s mystery, thriller, and crime imprint.
For readers familiar with Goldberg’s work, the story signals a shift in tone and pace. His recent Gangsterland trilogy and the short-story collection The Low Desert, all published by Counterpoint, are meticulously constructed, literary crime tales, heavy with moral weight and existential pondering.
Only Way Out is a different beast altogether. It’s faster, funnier, weirder. For this, Goldberg consciously stripped away the long narrative digressions that marked his earlier work and made the story more plot-heavy and propulsive. You won’t find a quiet, beautiful riff on a Bruce Springsteen lyric in this book; you will find a severed head.
After 15 novels and years of working within the literary crime sphere, Goldberg was ready to cut loose and write something more escapist, without losing the sharpness and wit that define his voice.
That leap into an off-kilter kind of crime novel didn’t come without hesitation. Goldberg worried about stepping too far into the commercial realm, says novelist Ivy Pochoda, his friend and colleague at UCR Palm Desert.
“This was a different kind of project, so he was nervous,” she says. “I encouraged him that he could work in this space, and he might actually enjoy it.”
For Pochoda, though, the shift feels inevitable.
“When I think of Tod, I think of action and motion. He’s so dynamic, so gregarious. Writing a straight-up crime novel is so essentially him,” she says. For her, Only Way Out proves Goldberg can “do both — write something smart and literary, but also commercial and fun.”
The novel’s plot centers on a crooked cop who stumbles onto a trove of stolen loot and becomes a vehicle for Goldberg’s wry observations about how society consumes crime. He deliberately set the story in Oregon, outside his usual Southern California and Las Vegas terrain, creating a mythical coastal town, “a dilapidated resort where tourists come to visit, but you’re constantly surrounded by the worst people who’ve ever existed.”
The setting allowed him to riff on his long-standing fascination with the intersection of crime and tourism: “I’ve always been intrigued by how we justify living in places that are stolen or where bad things happen, and how criminals get sensationalized and just become part of tourism,” he says.
In Only Way Out, the town thrives on chaos. A crime scene becomes an attraction, misdeeds are packaged as spectacle, and corruption itself becomes a kind of currency. Goldberg’s lens is both sharp and comic: The world is bleak, the stakes are real, but the public’s obsession with tragedy is ridiculous. Humor becomes the release valve, letting him tackle morality, greed, and violence without slowing the story’s pulse.
For all its indictment of tragedy-related spectacle, Only Way Out is also a book about the necessity of laughter in a dark world. Goldberg wrote the bulk of it in the waiting room of the Lucy Curci Cancer Center at Eisenhower Health in Rancho Mirage, while his wife, Wendy, was receiving treatment.
“My only way out of that room was to take myself into a completely separate place,” he says. “I wanted to write somewhere that wasn’t my house, to just take my mind somewhere else.”
The novel’s humor stemmed from that place, from the uncertainty of life and the absurdity of human behavior. And, amid real-world anxiety and fear, Goldberg channeled that tension into a story designed to find humor even in the darkest moments. “The world is very much not a funny place these days, and I just wanted to entertain readers,” he says.
Comedy, after all, has been a lifeline for Goldberg. It’s been a way to stay upright when everything else feels unsteady. Still, he doubted whether it worked for the reader.
“I was worried it wasn’t funny, because I wasn’t feeling particularly funny,” he says. “But even Wendy said, ‘This is a really funny fucking book.’ ”
