Philip Marlowe in baggy pants. California 1970: The young hippie detective Doc Sportello is tasked with collecting debts from the bodyguard of a real estate mogul. However, when Doc awakens from a neon-bright marijuana haze, he finds himself face to face with Lieutenant Bigfoot Bjornsen. The bodyguard's corpse next to him looks like a freshly slaughtered turkey. The real estate mogul has been kidnapped, and Bigfoot, who enjoys showing off his barbed wire collection, doesn't like hippies. Pynchon, the "Shakespeare of pop culture" (Welt), writes about criminals and surfers, Manson and Nixon, the end of the Summer of Love, and the birth of the internet. "The most accessible work by the greatest American author of our time, the perfect gateway drug." (Stern).