Ripped straight from the zeitgeist of the 1980s, Nisbet's novella is set in a sun-drenched San Francisco, where the computer becomes the protagonist's co-conspirator and both writer and machine begin to threaten the written word itself. The city provides a backdrop oozing with drugs, poets and danger. Nisbet has written a mad-cap meditation on the angst of a writer caught up in a world where the rent is due, new technology offers up illicit ways to produce the latest bestseller and the detective of one's latest novel might just turn up at the bar.