Peter Plate. One Foot Off the Gutter (1995) 197 pp. [tpo]
Publisher’s description: “Our narrator is Coddy, an underpaid, sleep-deprived, overweight police officer. Between arresting dopefiends and robbers, Coddy—with the help of his partner Bellamy, a homeless cop—is engaged in a battle with squatters for possession of an abandoned Victorian building in San Francisco’s Mission District. When the two cops narrowly miss catching the armed robber of a Mission Street liquor store, a game of hide and seek ensues that escalates into a catechism in destruction.” This is the first novel in the author’s Mission Quartet.