Calico by Lee Goldberg is the story of Detective Beth McDade, set in Barstow California, and her most recent homicide case, a seemingly homeless/indigent man hit by a mobile home on the night of a thunder and lightning storm and a large explosion at the nearby military base.

The Mojave Desert doesn’t seem like the best location for a life or a detective/crime story. Beth is visited by a previous acquaintance from the LAPD who is investigating the disappearance of a man last known to have been driving in the area of Barstow. Just as Beth’s investigation gets intriguing due to some odd results revealed by the coroner, the author takes back a hundred years or so to the mining town of Calico, not far from the present-day Barstow.

What promised to be a straightforward crime story set in an unusual location, now becomes a most intriguing and, at times, difficult to fathom story of time travel. The night of the storm, it seems, a rip in time appeared and at least one person traveled back in time and another traveled through the rip, forward in time. The story now lives in two times: Beth’s story, attempting to gather evidence to support her bizarre theory that the corpse dug up on a building site is that of the man from LA who was last seen just two weeks ago – and the story of that man’s life a hundred or so years ago in Barstow where he landed after falling through the rip in time.   

The plot has been carefully constructed such that this story, unlike most time travel stories, feels plausible. The characters are sufficiently flawed to be real people that we can identify with and cheer for and they relate to each in what feels like a real manner without it feeling forced or deliberate.