One Foot off the Gutter

The first novel in the Mission Quartet takes place in the late 1980s. Coddy, a policeman and the story s narrator, is 47 years old, underpaid, and overweight. His partner, Bellamy, lives out of their shared squad car. When a fellow officer is gunned down, a neighborhood of abandoned buildings becomes a war zone for transients, middle-class professionals, and thieves.

Peter Plate taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of seven previous novels, including One Foot Off the Gutter (1995), Snitch Factory (1997), Police and Thieves (1999), and Angels of Catastrophe (2001). Plate lives in San Francisco, where, at spoken word concerts or readings, he has been known to speak his novels from memory.