THE NOVELIST’S ability to convincingly render the most arcane subjects is often due to the guidance given by persons truly knowledgeable about things novelists only pretend to know. The experts whose advice guided me in the preparation of this manuscript included priests, parole agents, lawyers, filmmakers, and photographers. Special thanks are owed to Meredith Murray, who kindly shared with me details of a petty crime that are mirrored in this fiction. Thanks also to Allen Plone, who always seems to know the answer to everything I ask. This book and the two novels that precede it owe an intellectual debt to City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, urban and environmental histories of Southern California by Mike Davis that have helped to clarify my vision of Los Angeles as a city of unbearable beauty and dread.
This manuscript was edited by Amanda Murray at Simon & Schuster, who proved an ideal reader.
I owe a debt of hospitality to the inhabitants of the city of Prague and the Catalan village of San Pol de Mar, where this book was written. Dekuji Vám, prátelé. Gràcies, amics.