Slumming his way among the often tony, sometimes seedy but always
alluring venues of the Southern California coastline, Michael Devlin,
the jaded protagonist and private detective of South On Pacific Coast
Highway doggedly attempts to solve four murders, free a wrongly
imprisoned friend and wrest Zen enlightenment from a handful of better
forgotten dreams.
The entire story takes place over the course of one week in Laurel
Lagoon, a sleepy little beach town, modeled after Laguna Beach, CA,
where the author has lived for many years. The backdrop is a
blistering summer heat wave. The tale begins on a hot and restless
summer night. A call comes in from an old friend, who has just been
arrested for murdering his wife. Off to clear his friend's name the
following morning, Michael instead is treated to another dead body at
the doorstep to his downtown office. By that evening, he has witnessed
the cops fish another dead body out of Newport Harbor and soon another
man involved in the case has been murdered out on Balboa Island.
Believing all of these murders are somehow connected, and convinced
that solving them is the only way Michael can clear his friend's name,
he chases a dead man's cheating wife from a fortune teller down on
Coast Highway in Doheny Beach to the decaying trailers and rotting
fish along the Salton Sea and back to the restless summer nights of
Laurel Lagoon, her mane of long, red hair a talisman to Michael's
better forgotten dreams. Add a hard-nosed local cop, two pain in the
ass Feds, a couple of nasty boys from south of the border, one Russian
named Boris, along with a miniature poodle named Butch and you have
the ingredients for a great crime tale, a story of love gone wrong and
a searing portrait of life along the Southern California coast.