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Counterpoint: 304 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. For a crime writer, a sense of place means as much as clean prose and a morally tormented hero. So a lot of what makes Tod Goldberg’s lively, often entertainingly snarky story collection “The Low Desert” so cohesive is its preferred destination for murder and despair: West Coast exurbia. “The Royal Californian” takes place in a stretch of Indio that “could have been Carson City or Bakersfield or Van Nuys or anywhere else where someone had the wise idea to plant a palm tree and then surround it with cement.” The penultimate story, “Ragtown,” concludes in a “rut of desert” outside Las Vegas. A handful of stories are set by the Salton Sea, a shriveling resort area ravaged by military tests, climate change and corporate exploitation. “The middle of someone else’s mistakes,” as one charact ....
Review: Forget Chinatown, Jake: Todd Golberg's 'The Low Desert' finds noir in L.A.'s far outskirts msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.