Flip Your Wig

If you're going to be murdered in San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

San Francisco. August 1966. The Beatles haven't arrived yet to play their show at Candlestick Park, but Inspectors Henry Nash and Ross Belcher of the San Francisco Police Department's Homicide Detail already have their hands full with Beatlemania, or Beatle psychosis. Flip Your Wig tells the story of Inspectors Nash and Belcher as they attempt to unravel the chain of violent deaths that begins with a young musician found dead in a Mission District flophouse, a Beatle-themed Halloween mask stuck to his face with dried blood. When a bloody skirmish in Golden Gate Park threatens to shut the fog-bound city down, Inspectors Nash and Belcher find themselves up to their metaphorical Beatle wigs in murder. Flip Your Wig is also a story of people living in prisons of their own design, and of escapes that sometimes fail. It is a story told through the chiaroscuro lens of the noir novel rather than the rose-colored granny glasses that often idealize Sixties' tales. And yet Flip Your Wig displays the robust creative spirit that made the Sixties artistic counterculture interesting in the first place.