ABOUT THE BOOK

After a few weeks on the job, 40 something Earl Dean has become one of the best salesmen in Pomona. The 'ageing hipster' is putting together the money to claim his inheritance and oust his stepfather from the land first settled by his great-grandfather, an orange grower. But bad luck brings Dean to the house of Dan Brown, 'full-blown white trash', who once killed a cop and is now getting seriously drunk guarding the corpse of his brother Buddy until he learns who killed him.

Word arrives that Buddy was stabbed by a wild woman with blond dreadlocks, leader of a band called Pomona Queen, and Dean, a great believer in secret signs, has a flash: the same name was used for the artwork on his great-grandfather's packing crates.

The novel alternates between the buildup to a climactic confrontation with the alleged killer at a mall concert, and Dean's thoughts as he rides around town, the prisoner of Dan and his henchmen - for Dean, high as a kite but also badly shaken after various escape attempts, keeps seeing "the pale grid of the dead": especially his great-grandfather, shot mysteriously as Pomona's Chinatown was torched, and his one true love, Rayann, dying insane after too many bad trips.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"Kem Nunn writes directly out of the lineage of James M Cain and Raymond Chandler. If there is a contemporary writer with a deeper sense of evil, I don't know who it would be" - Jim Harrison

"Kem Nunn is one of a rare breed, a novelist who knows how to plot and tell a story. There is amazing energy here" - Elmore Leonard

'...he has a real feel for the kind of dementia that depends on getting the balance of drugs and alcohol just right.' - Chris Petit, the Guardian

"Hammett, Chandler, James Cain and Ross MacDonald, Kem Nunn has surpassed them all" - L.A.Times

Praise for The Dogs of Winter and Tapping the Source

"Forceful and gripping..in the same league as the best of Chandler and James Crumley. The all-time great surfing novel" - Robert Stone

"Tense and driven with a sense of the apocalypse around the corner." - Washington Post

"What Hemingway's Nick Adams did for fishing, Kem Nunn does for surfing. Through the sensibility of its hero and the sensitivity of its author, Tapping the Source puts you there and makes you understand." - Saturday Review

"Hammett, Chandler, James Cain and Ross MacDonald, Kem Nunn has surpassed them all" - L.A.Times

"The Dogs of Winter is the greatest novel ever written about surfing. The second best is Nunn's Tapping the Source. The third best is whatever Nunn writes next" - Newsweek

ESSENTIAL TRIVIA

Tapping the Source was nominated for the American Book Award's Best First Fiction.