It's Christmastime in the Southland in this near-future vision of 21st century California. Our narrators, an ex-con turned pistol-carrying priest, and Sugar Child, a halfway house resident, have just met. The priest is a donations solicitor for Blessed World, the church and charity, and works downtown, "where I bang a tambourine and beg for money in the mellifluous, singsong voice beloved by children worldwide: Help the needy, give to the poor, amen." But nothing is going right. Hassled by SWAT cops, and troubled after a failed marriage, he's losing faith in himself. Sugar Child has her own problems. She's arrested by SWAT police, and sent to "lockdown." Her opinion of the priest is no better: She's never met a man who was stronger than a woman. Looking at him, she never will.As the days speed toward Christmas—holiday shoppers aren't giving him any money—the priest wonders whether there isn't some new mission awaiting him, one that'll help the people in the...

San Francisco is on the verge of collapse in this gritty, grimy noir set in a near-future that gets closer every second. Former San Francisco Literary Laureate Peter Plate who taught himself to write fiction during eight years squatting in abandoned buildings, delivers a fast-paced dystopian and speculative novel — the latest in a hardboiled writing career that spans the era of out-of-control gentrification in the Bay Area.California is on fire. Everyone has the virus. Sinister patrols of SWAT teams seem to materialize out of thin air, and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up exiled down in Bakersfield.In the middle of it all, the nearly thirteen-year-old narrator in Night of the Short Eyes must take care of his mess of a family—Dad is in jail for stealing guns with his partner, Ronnie, and Mom is shacking up with the social worker assigned to the family’s case—and he only has one thing to his advantage:...

Amid a background of bank robberies and fatal gunshot wounds, the real drama here is bureaucratic and human. In her response to the adversity all around her, Peter Plate’s Charlene Hassler, a social worker at the huge, anthill-like Department of Social Services complex on San Francisco’s Otis Street, is a literary tour de force. Straight out of Dante’s Inferno, Plate’s DSS is an eternal holding pen of unfulfilled needs and desires. Charlene is under investigation, and snitches are everywhere. A co-worker is murdered. Charlene’s boss and former mentor spends amorous afternoons with her arch-enemy. The custodian burglarizes her desk, then shoots her in the knee after he imagines she’s ratted on him. As the anger and chaos at DSS reach epic proportions, we witness the strange heroism of Charlene’s coworkers when they foil a hold-up; her boss’s real vulnerability after a suicide attempt; and Charlene herself triumphantly winning her personal battle for romance in this true human comedy.

A cop is gunned down and unless Ricky Durrutti, a petty criminal with a short biography and a long rap sheet, can figure out who the real shooter is, he's a dead man. From Hunt's Donuts, opposite where the killing took place, to his room in the El Capitán Hotel, from the blue grass and steel Federal Building off Golden Gate Avenue to the Ritmo Latino record store, and from the Roxie Cinema on 16th Street to the Ramshackle Victorian homes of Treat Street where Lonely Boy lives--the chase is on. Salvadoreno gangs and Mexicans, cops and Jewish gangsters, drag queens and heroin addicts, speed freaks and low rent hookers, low-lives rising rising to the challenge of making sense of a murder. Out of the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski, here is the twenty-first century world of Peter Plate.

A cop is gunned down and unless Ricky Durrutti, a petty criminal with a short biography and a long rap sheet, can figure out who the real shooter is, he's a dead man. From Hunt's Donuts, opposite where the killing took place, to his room in the El Capitán Hotel, from the blue grass and steel Federal Building off Golden Gate Avenue to the Ritmo Latino record store, and from the Roxie Cinema on 16th Street to the Ramshackle Victorian homes of Treat Street where Lonely Boy lives--the chase is on. Salvadoreno gangs and Mexicans, cops and Jewish gangsters, drag queens and heroin addicts, speed freaks and low rent hookers, low-lives rising rising to the challenge of making sense of a murder. Out of the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski, here is the twenty-first century world of Peter Plate.

One foggy day in San Francisco brings together bloody ghosts, a dandyish thug, capricious cops, a suicidal punk rocker, a hyperliterate slumlord, and a sweet old lady sent by God to hand out cash from a hijacked armored car. In Fogtown, Peter Plate uses a loving hand to carve his characters out of hallucination, perversity, and tenacity. Plate's noir sensibility gives him special fluency with the weary souls of urban America's down and out; Fogtown describes a new age unmistakably built on the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski.

The narrator of Police and Thieves, Doojie, is a small-time dealer who lives in a garage behind a laundromat with his two partners in crime. They sell dope of questionable quality at reasonable prices. But when one night Doojie sees a renegade cop shoot an unarmed Mexican, he knows that things are about to change. Soon he and his buddies are running for their lives. Fast, ferocious, gritty, and bleak, Police and Thieves is contemporary noir at its best, and one of the most ambitious entries in the Peter Plate canon.

It seems like everyone in California is going to prison these days. And as another hot Christmas approaches in San Francisco, Robert Grogan and Slatts Calhoun are about to make the street after a stretch in San Quentin. On the inside Robert and Slatts were inmates and lovers, but Robert has a young wife and a daughter on the outside and they're probably not going to be thrilled about sharing him with Slatts. Trouble waits for them in the whitened winter sunlight of the city.Bleak and magical, afflicted with winos, yuppies, lawyers, tourists, parole officers, drug dealers, and cops, Soon the Rest Will Fall tells a tale of blight, recidivism, and transcendent love. Peter Plate brings us his best work to date--a manic, intensely human, and lyrical portrait of two cons trying to make it in the sweltering holiday madhouse of a three-time loser's city by the bay.

Amid a background of bank robberies and fatal gunshot wounds, the real drama here is bureaucratic and human. In her response to the adversity all around her, Peter Plate's Charlene Hassler, a social worker at the huge, anthill-like Department of Social Services complex on San Francisco's Otis Street, is a literary tour de force. Straight out of Dante's Inferno, Plate's DSS is an eternal holding pen of unfulfilled needs and desires. Charlene is under investigation, and snitches are everywhere. A co-worker is murdered. Charlene's boss and former mentor spends amorous afternoons with her arch-enemy. The custodian burglarizes her desk, then shoots her in the knee after he imagines she's ratted on him. As the anger and chaos at DSS reach epic proportions, we witness the strange heroism of Charlene's coworkers when they foil a hold-up; her boss's real vulnerability after a suicide attempt; and Charlene herself triumphantly winning her personal battle for romance in this true human comedy.

Ricky Bellamy is shot in the head by a vigilante at the corner of Geneva and Mission in San Francisco. He's declared brain-dead and hooked up to life support, but ten months later he emerges from his coma. The bullet stays lodged in his head--inoperable, the doctors say--but with it comes what Ricky calls "visions, a third eye." Dirty in Cashmere follows Ricky through the recent past of San Francisco, a city dealing with the fall-out from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, after which massive contamination spread across the Pacific Ocean to California. He's set adrift in a world in which Life--the street name of an experimental radiation vaccine--is the currency by which both criminal enterprises and survival are won. As he squats in abandoned houses and brands himself as an "oracle" who can see the future, Ricky wonders whether there isn't a bigger picture out there, one that maybe he can't focus on or perhaps one that someone's hiding from him. And as his...

It seems like everyone in California is going to prison these days. And as another hot Christmas approaches in San Francisco, Robert Grogan and Slatts Calhoun are about to make the street after a stretch in San Quentin. On the inside Robert and Slatts were inmates and lovers, but Robert has a young wife and a daughter on the outside and they’re probably not going to be thrilled about sharing him with Slatts. Trouble waits for them in the whitened winter sunlight of the city.Bleak and magical, afflicted with winos, yuppies, lawyers, tourists, parole officers, drug dealers, and cops, Soon the Rest Will Fall tells a tale of blight, recidivism, and transcendent love. Peter Plate brings us his best work to date—a manic, intensely human, and lyrical portrait of two cons trying to make it in the sweltering holiday madhouse of a three-time loser’s city by the bay.

The time is 1996. Our narrator, Coddy, a policeman, is underpaid, sleep-deprived, and overweight. Coddy's partner, Bellamy, is homeless, living out of their shared squad car, littering the back seat with his dirty underwear and empty cigarette packs. Free Box and Barbie are squatters who rob Rainbow Health Foods at gunpoint for something to eat. From the junkies openly shooting up on stoops to the homeless men with their fleets of shopping carts piled high with garbage, Peter Plate's Mission District is "a catechism in destruction," one that doesn't end until someone is apprehended for an unsolved crime. A story about inner-city, west coast gentrification at the end of the 20th century.

One foggy day in San Francisco brings together bloody ghosts, a dandyish thug, capricious cops, a suicidal punk rocker, a hyperliterate slumlord, and a sweet old lady sent by God to hand out cash from a hijacked armored car. In Fogtown, Peter Plate uses a loving hand to carve his characters out of hallucination, perversity, and tenacity. Plate's noir sensibility gives him special fluency with the weary souls of urban America's down and out; Fogtown describes a new age unmistakably built on the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski.