Bibliography
Dirty-in-Cashmere
February 15, 2016
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Seven Stories Press
Dirty in Cashmere
Peter Plate
Dirty in Cashmere, Peter Plate, Seven Stories Press
2016

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."

A stunning work of speculative noir, Dirty in Cashmere follows Ricky through the ravaged San Francisco of the near-future, a city dealing with the fall-out from a 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--first for nefarious purposes, then for more noble ones--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 skills as an oracle are called upon by more powerful forces, it becomes clear that the one thing Ricky wants most to predict--his own future--is the only thing impervious to his newfound insights. 

About Peter Plate

Named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.





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