Dick Lochte

Serendipity Dahlquist is a headstrong roller-blading teenager living in LA who has lost her dog. She asks private investigator Leo Bloodworth to help her find the missing pet. In what proves to have been a moment of madness, Bloodworth agrees to take on the case, unleashing an appalling--but also extremely entertaining--series of extremely homicidal events.

Sleeping Dog remains, almost 40 years after its publication, one of the most wonderful crime debuts: by turns charming, hilarious and pathological, Lochte's novel is a great celebration of everything that is most deplorable and hair-raising about California in the 1980s.