Mike Ripley retired from reviewing new crime fiction after over 32 years at the coal-face. He now restricts himself to worthy or unusual titles.
He is the author of the award-winning ‘Angel’ series of comedy thrillers set mainly in Essex and London’s East End. Ripley has twice won the Crime Writers' Association Last Laugh Dagger for best humourous crime novel.
He also continued the Albert Campion detective novels of the late Margery Allingham to great acclaim. His non-fiction reader's history Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a survey of the boom in British thrillers 1953-1975 was published in 2017 winning the H.R.F Keating Award
Beth McDade is a splendid heroine, a former LAPD detective now reduced (due to her zero tolerance of corrupt cops) to being one of 2½ detectives in the sheriff’s office of Barstow, a forgotten small town on the edge of the Mojave desert in southern California. She also has to put up with a Watch Commander named Ripley who calls her at a very inconvenient moment with orders to investigate a traffic fatality in which a homeless man has been killed ‘by motor home’ out on a desert road.
Whilst investigating that and a flurry of impudent robberies, another body turns up in a shallow grave. This one is, by all indications, over a hundred years old yet detailed forensic examination suggests, outrageously, that this is the body of thirty-five year-old chef podcaster Owen Slader who disappeared off the face of the Earth, along with his i-phone and Mercedes SUV, only a week ago. Is there any connection to mysterious lights in the night sky coming from a local army base (dismissed as ‘dumpster fires’), or does the answer lie in the nearby western ghost town of Calico?
Detective McDade has to deal with all the police procedure involved, and she does so brilliantly, but then realises that the full explanation of events around Calico can only be explained by time travel!
In the hands of a lesser storyteller, this blending of three genres – crime thriller, sci-fi and western – could have produced an unholy stew but Lee Goldberg steers his plot with care, maintaining a perfect sense of intrigue and suspense throughout. There are numerous knowing, over-the-shoulder nods to the Back to the Future franchise, a leavening of wry humour and some genuinely heart-warming touches, plus a great sting in the tail.
Calico is an audacious thriller which probably should not work, but it does thanks to a bravura performance from author Goldberg and a straight-shooting, stand-up-gal heroine.
