Dirty in Cashmere: A Novel

Ricky Bellamy is shot in the head by a vigilante at the corner of Geneva and Mission in San Francisco. He’s declared brain-dead and hooked up to life support, but ten months later he emerges from his coma. The bullet stays lodged in his head—inoperable, the doctors say—but with it comes what Ricky calls “visions, a third eye.”

Dirty in Cashmere follows Ricky through the recent past of San Francisco, a city dealing with the fall-out from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, after which ...