Tod Goldberg

Covert spy Michael Westen has found himself in forced seclusion in Miami-and a little paranoid. Watched by the FBI, cut off from intelligence contacts, and with his assets frozen, Weston is on ice with a warning: stay there or get "disappeared." Driven to find out who burned him and why, he's biding his time helping people with nowhere else to turn. People like socialite Cricket O'Connor whose own husband has vanished, along with her fortune...

"Tod Goldberg is a terrific writer, and The Low Desert is a smart, surprising page turner." —Don Winslow Raymond Carver meets Elmore Leonard in this extraordinary collection of contemporary crime writing set in the critically acclaimed Gangsterland universe, a series called "gloriously original" by The New York Times Book Review. With gimlet-eyed cool and razor-sharp wit, these spare, stylish stories from a master of modern crime fiction assemble a world of gangsters and con men, of do-gooders breaking bad and those caught in the crossfire. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the unexplainable loss of an adopted daughter; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar. Witty, brutal, and fast-paced, these stories expand upon the saga of Chicago hitman-turned-Vegas-Rabbi Sal Cupertine--first introduced in Gangsterland and continued in Gangster Nation--while revealing how the line between good and bad is often a mirage.