Five Star First Edition Mystery - The Walk [Hardcover]

Lee Goldberg (Author)

Book Description

Series: Five Star First Edition Mystery | Publication Date: January 2, 2004

An Edgar Award-nominee Author

It's one minute after the Big One. Marty Slack, a TV network executive, crawls out from under his Mercedes. 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. 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. Looters rampage through the streets. His dangerous, unpredictable journey home will take him through the different worlds of what was once Los Angeles. 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.

Edgar-nominee Lee Goldberg lives in Tarzana, California.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"More than anything, THE WALK is 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 Blog

"THE WALK is about the hero's moral courage as much as it is about a paralyzed world. This is memorable fiction."   --Spur-Award winning author Richard Wheeler

Harrowing and funny... --Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

From the Publisher

The powerful new thriller by two-time Edgar Award-nominee and acclaimed TV writer/producer Lee Goldberg.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 235 pages
• Publisher: Five Star; 1 edition (January 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159414110X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594141102
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (171 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,229,003 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Decent Afternoon's Read, September 4, 2009

By 

Geoffrey A. Snyder (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Walk (Kindle Edition)

At the beginning of this novel, I pretty much hated the protagonist, Marty Slack. He was timid, shallow and self-involved and pretty much a stereotype of everything annoying about Corporate America types. As time went on, he began to grow on me as he wandered around the city. By the time Marty's plot twist revelation was revealed, I had already figured it out but it still worked in context of the story.

The book itself was an interesting snapshot of the aftermath of a major disaster and how people react. Some of the images were pretty disturbing but nothing rang all that false or contrived. (Although flooding Hollywood was a little reminiscent of the dam burst in the movie 'Earthquake' - but still pretty cool.) As with any disaster movie/story, Marty should have died numerous times but it's not unexpected to have the hero survive where normal people would be long gone.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It was fun but nothing unexpected occurred. It is pretty much a standard disaster story. That's not necessarily a bad thing when you're in the mood for some entertaining brain candy.

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I loved the Walk, September 17, 2009

By 

Joanne Harris "Serendipity" (GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Walk (Kindle Edition)

This book did live up to all of the great reviews. I absolutely loved the combination of the apocalyptic story line mixed with the humanistic qualities of the characters. I love any book where I am surprised, and left to think about the book, and this book did that. It was not too over the top gory, which it could have been and I think takes away from a story sometimes, but just horrific enough to really give me goosebumps. It was like a horror movie from the seventies in that it left something up to the imagination. I got slightly bored with some of the description of the LA area, but that is just me.I will recommend this book, and look forward to other books from this author.

57 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good book that could have been great., June 23, 2009

By 

AliceA (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Walk (Kindle Edition)

I would have given this book 4 stars but for one thing. The last obstacle that the protagonist faces was just too much (I don't want to spoil it). The author lost me right before the end of the book. Not that everything that happened before that in the book was believable, but the author convinced me it was believable in the way it was written. But that last one ...

Otherwise, the book was very compelling. I wanted to keep reading. As others have stated, the hero was flawed but you grow to care about his fate. Some of the conversations were very stilted and formulaic, but then you realize that those conversations were take-offs on bad TV or film premises and the author quickly disabuses you of any notion that the language was meant to be realistic.

There is a great deal of good humor mixed in with the high drama of the premise. I got stared at on the plane yesterday when I laughed out loud during the depiction of a dream/nightmare in which the protagonist was interacting with characters in disaster movies - one particular line about Anne Heche in Volcano set me off. The author manages to nicely mesh the drama and the humor.

I really did enjoy the book, but I thought it jumped the shark with the last crisis the hero faced. Even though the book often lampooned disaster movies and such, it wasn't in itself a lampoon so it just didn't seem to fit.