PEACE, LOVE AND HAIGHT

In San Francisco during the waning aftermath of the summer of love, “hippie elder” Frederick Dorn gets caught between the cops and the mob after he’s party to a notorious drug dealer’s death.

The dealer, “Rat-Man” Rathkin, was responsible for the heroin overdose of Freddie’s former girlfriend, a problem case who left Freddie because she “didn’t belong to any one man” and took up with Rat-Man because he had the drugs. When the cops first asked Freddie, who runs a gallery, to help them nail Rat-Man by going undercover, he refused, nervous about being seen as working “for the man.” But with drug deaths piling up in the city in the late-1960s following the Mafia’s move into the Haight, and Rat-Man’s experimental Orange Marmalade acid frying the brains of users including Freddie’s best friend, Freddie agrees to set Rat-Man up for a fall—a literal one, as it turns out, off the Golden Gate Bridge. On the run from the mob, to whom Rat-Man owed money, Freddie accepts a job rescuing a girl from the nefarious Baba Gagi’s commune, where the young female residents are drugged, brainwashed and used for sex—an outcome he barely avoids himself. Talley has a tendency to state the obvious (“Peace and dope and free love were a stone groove, but they wouldn’t effect any worldwide behavioral or systemic change”). And the young author can seem generationally removed from the scenes he glibly describes. At the same time, this is a fresh take on a nostalgically remembered era. Rock fans will enjoy appearances by celebrities including impresario Bill Graham, “grinning and swarthy”; David Crosby, grower of his own “Croz” weed; and “that actor cat” Harry Dean Stanton. Jerry Garcia, alas, is a no-show.

Murder mixed with psychedelia makes for an agreeable high.