"What an exciting action thriller"

TV network executive Marty Slack is on location in downtown Los Angeles when the Earthquake hits. It is the Big One and the destruction is widespread and covers an area from Santa Barbara to San Juan Capistrano. Downed electrical lines and broken gas lines turned the affected area into a raging inferno. Marty's only thought is walking the thirty miles to his wife and home to the gated community of Oakridge Hills Estates in Calabasas.

He puts together a survival kit and starts walking with his eyes down so he doesn't have to see the devastation or the people he can't help. He runs into Buck, a big tough bounty hunter, who joins his trek. Marty, who doesn't want to be a hero, saves a kid trapped in a car that might fall off the bridge. He gives comfort to a dying woman and takes the picture she gives him of her little girl and asks him to pick up at the Pre School. After surviving a tidal wave from a broken dam, he picks up little Clara risking his own life to save her from an escaped tiger. After all Buck and Marty's pain and suffering, security at the latter's community refuses to let them enter.

THE WALK is an exciting action packed thriller that would make a fantastic movie because it focuses on the protagonist who undergoes a metamorphosis from an uncaring selfish man to a heroic figure. The trials and tribulations he undergoes allows the real Marty Slack to shine as he proves he is no slacker. Lee Goldberg always entertains his audience with a gripping drama and THE WALK is certainly that.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted December 23, 2003

Summary

It's one minute after the Big One. Marty Slack, a TV network executive, crawls out from under his Mercedes, parked outside what once was a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, the location for a new TV show. 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. In his car are a pair of sturdy walking shoes and a backpack of food, water, and supplies. 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. His dangerous, unpredictable journey home will take him through the different worlds of what was once Los Angeles. Wildfires rage out of control. Flood waters burst through collapsed dams. Natural gas explosions consume neighborhoods. Sinkholes swallow entire buildings. After-shocks rip apart the ground. Looters rampage through the streets. 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.