Tod Goldberg, a resident of Indio, has garnered wide critical acclaim, literary awards and legions of fans worldwide for his uncanny skill at writing irresistible page-turners that also have literary depth.
The darkly comedic writer tends to tackle things that he’s obsessed with in his fiction, and for Only Way Out (Thomas & Mercer, published Dec. 1, 2025), he found himself fixated on our tendency to mythologize certain kinds of criminals and their crimes, while ignoring a system that creates them, warehouses them, and fails to rehabilitate them, and often turns them into entertainment.
In the novel, failed lawyer Robert Green has a plan for the ultimate, fail-safe heist: Crack 300 safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with loads of cash and his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If weren’t for the damned freezing rain …
Meanwhile in the dying resort town of Granite Shores, Ore., cop Jack Biddle is the self-appointed czar―mostly of bad decisions. With a pile of life-threatening gambling debts, Jack’s looking for a way out. He spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below. In the wreckage, Jack finds a very dead Robert, millions in heisted loot—and an opportunity. All Jack has to do is clean up the mess and not get caught. But making poor choices has a way creating really bad consequences. Penny, and an unlikely ally, Mitch Diamond, a wild card ex-con who knows more about the missing fortune than he lets on, all have an endgame, and there’s only one way out for all of them.
Tod Goldberg is a New York Times best-selling author of 15 books, including the acclaimed Gangsterland quartet. His books have been published in a dozen countries and have won or have been a finalist for the Hammett Prize, the Southwest Book of the Year, the Strand Critics Award, the Reading the West Award, the International Thriller of the Year, and many more. His short-fiction and essays appear widely and have been honored with selection in Best American Mystery and Suspense and Best American Essays.
He is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where he founded and directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts.
Here is an excerpt from Only Way Out.
Chapter Thirteen
Wonder Valley, California
Saturday, July 15
The Creosote Saloon looked condemned, but then everything out this way looked condemned, even the kid sitting out front on the bumper of a truck, playing a game on his iPhone. He was maybe 13, wore checkered Vans with white socks pulled up his calves, cut-off jeans, no shirt. It was 110 degrees outside, but the kid wasn’t sweating. When Mitch got out of his Caddie, the kid didn’t even look up from his game.
“This place open?” Mitch asked.
“You’re not from here,” the kid said.
“Not even close.”
The kid’s phone made a buzzing sound. “Shit. You made me fuck up.”
The Creosote used to be a house, but where the front door should be, there was a wall of cinder blocks. There was a banner, however, that said they had cold beer, which sounded good. “There a way in?”
“Until 6,” he said, “you gotta go around back.” He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder. Mitch made out a rusted water tower, the Texaco logo still visible on it if you sort of squinted, the wreck of an old service station beside it. Then nothing but open desert. The kid saw where Mitch was looking. Sighed. Hopped off the truck. “Sorry. Other side. Unless you’re one of those assholes who moved here during the pandemic. Then it’s closed.”
“That wasn’t me.”
He pointed at the car. “You have a spare tire? There’s nails and broken glass all over here.”
“Run-flats,” Mitch said.
“No offense, but that’s kind of pussy, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think, no,” Mitch said. Ever since he drove Paul Copeland’s Caddie to Granite Shores, Mitch had a thing for them, so when the firm told him he could have any car he wanted—within reason—on his 10-year anniversary, he immediately went for an XTS, though what he really wanted was a 1979 Seville. Maybe he’d buy one of those with his own money one day, but Mitch was still not in a place where he felt great with his government paperwork, his fake names only as good as the person looking into him. He wasn’t about to try the DMV, much less TSA.
Mitch took a twenty out of his wallet, offered it to the kid. “Why don’t you make sure no nails jump into my tires.” The kid pocketed the cash like he was expecting it. “Something else,” Mitch said. “Is Bonnie working today?” Intel Mitch had was that Penny Green was going by Bonnie Clyde. Clever.
“You’d have to ask inside,” the kid said.
“You don’t work here?”
The kid tapped something on his phone, turned it around. There was a photo on it of three women sitting inside a giant kiddie pool filled with water and ice, bottles of beer floating between them. One of them wore a Christian Undead Necro Teens T-shirt. “If she’s one of these women, then yeah, I guess.”
“You walk around snapping photos of women?” Mitch asked.
“They don’t mind.”
“Do you ask?”
The kid said, “It’s the desert,” like that explained everything.
Mitch started off toward the back. Stopped. “What happens at 6?”
“Huh?”
“You said at 6 there’s a different way in.”
“Oh yeah,” the kid said. “They knock the cinder blocks down.”
Penny was still in the kiddie pool when Mitch came around the rear of the building, but the two ladies with her were now inside the bar, one lighting candles inside mason jars and setting them up along the L-shaped bar, the other straightening up the bottles and glasses, wiping down the spider-webbed mirror on the wall. There were four other kiddie pools in a semicircle around the property, all filled with water, ice, and bottles of beer. There was a man in one of them, eyes closed, head tilted over the rim of the pool, face flush to the sun. His chest was covered in two tattoos—on one side, a wolf’s head, on the other, the words HANK FOREVER. He snored out of his open mouth.
“Good way to go blind,” Mitch said.
Penny said, “You want a beer?” Mitch told her he did. She took one from her own pool, twisted off the cap, handed it to him. “Odds are he’ll drown first.”
“Optimistic,” Mitch said.
Penny watched the man for a few seconds, then said, “Want to put some action on it?”
“Sure.”
Penny got out of the pool, went inside the bar, came back with a chair for Mitch. “Five?” she said.
“How much is the beer?”
“$4.95.”
“Well, let’s make it interesting,” Mitch said. He took out everything in his wallet, set it on the ground under a bottle. “Thirty-three bucks.”
Penny cocked her head. “Do I know you?”
“Not yet,” Mitch said.
“Then you’ll have to trust me,” she said. “I don’t have any pockets.” All she had on was the T-shirt and a bathing suit bottom. There was a pair of shorts on a chaise longue a few feet away. “But I’m good for 33 bucks.”
“Oh,” Mitch said, “I bet you’re good for a few million.” He sat down, sipped his beer, let that hang there, Penny watching him with no more interest than before. In the distance, a single coyote strolled through the desert, planes crisscrossed the deep blue sky, heading into and out of Palm Springs, which was just over the mountain. Somewhere, the smell of cooking meat wafted through. All that and the passed-out man didn’t move an inch.
“What’s his name?” Mitch asked after a while.
“We call him Yard-Shitting Sam,” Penny said.
“To his face?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“And no one drops the G?” Mitch asked.
“Only way I’ve heard it said. What do people call you?”
“Mitch Diamond.” He put out his hand. She let it sit there. Okay. “You really going by Bonnie Clyde?”
No reaction.
“Trying it on,” she said. “Kids don’t seem to know it.”
“You got paper with it?”
“Don’t you know?” He did. She didn’t. No court in the land would grant Penny Green that change. “How long did it take to find me?”
“A bit,” Mitch said. She’d been out of prison for almost two years and moved around a fair amount.
“I guess Keith Morrison wants to interview me,” she said.
“The guy from Dateline?”
“That’s him,” she said. “Thought I’d wait to see if he showed up one night.” Penny pointed at Yard-Shitting Sam. “Oh no.” He was trying to turn over. “Here we go.” Yard-Shitting Sam shifted in the pool, his head slipped off the rim, and then he was thrashing underwater, sending bottles of beer and waves of ice water over the side and onto the desert floor, before he burst out of the pool, gasping for air.
Penny went inside for a minute, came out with a towel, gave it to Yard-Shitting Sam. He dried his face, his hair, his arms.
“You good?”
“Guess I fell asleep again,” he said. He picked up one of the beers that had sloshed away, cracked it, walked into the bar.
“Again?” Mitch said to Penny when she returned.
“I may have had some previous experience with this situation.”
She picked up the bottle, gathered up the cash, waited for … something. “That it?” she said.
“All 33 dollars.”
“Don’t you have some papers to serve me with or something?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Well, according to my security detail in the parking lot, the Cadillac out front is registered to the law firm my brother and I robbed,” she said. “And then there’s the scars on your knuckles.”
“I’m not here to bother you,” Mitch said. “Can I buy you dinner or something?”
“Are you asking me out on a date?”
“No,” Mitch said, but the truth was, once he subtracted out her notoriously bad qualities—she’d spent half her time in Gig Harbor in solitary owing to her propensity for violence—Penny Green did seem like the kind of person he could make some bad decisions with, if the moment were right. The moment was certainly not right. “I want to talk to you about a chance to get back on your feet.”
“You work for Barer & Harris and you … want to help me?”
“I work for a law firm. To not act in the interest of our clients is not what we do. That would be like asking someone with a 200 IQ to act like a moron when they’re clearly a genius.” Mitch paused, let that sink in. “Which is why I’m here, today.”
She looked at her watch. “I get off at 10,” she said. “There’s a Black Bear Diner in Yucca. It’s open 24 hours. I’ll listen to you for as long as it takes for me to eat a stack of blueberry pancakes that your 33 bucks is going to pay for.” She picked her shorts off the chaise, slid them on. “And it’s closer to 220.”
“I rounded.”
“You rounded down. No one rounds down. My IQ is 216,” she said, “but you knew that, too.”
He did indeed.
Copyright 2025 by Tod Goldberg. From Only Way Out by Tod Goldberg. Reprinted by permission of Thomas & Mercer, a division of Amazon Publishing.