"Everyone knows that California sunshine is the world's loneliest light," says Benny, who inhabits an underworld of desperados and grotesques and spends much of his free time at the Greasy Tuesday, a squalid, southern California neighborhood dive teeming with local legends.<BR>One night, one of these legends walks through the door: Gus "Mad Dog" Miller, a huge, tattoo-laden Vietnam vet who sports a necklace of severed ears and whose job at the Greasy Tuesday is "to keep the riffraff out." "But everyone's riffraff here," Benny protests. Six months later, Benny, transfixed by this twisted Faistaffian personality, is arrested on suspicion of double murder after attending the freak "Howling Head" festival in the Mojave Desert.<BR>Combining elements of classic noir, dark comedy, and a misfit's memoir reminiscent of Notes from Underground, Christopher Goffard, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, brings life to the darker side of west coast counter-culture In a literary crime novel that will be a delight for fans of Elmore Leonard, the Coen brothers, Carl Hiassen, and Charles Bukowski.