Former Boston sportswriter McGee Brown is traveling cross-country with his fiance when they call it quits somewhere around Nevada. With no job and no girl, Brown pushes on to California, where a fruitless job hunt lands him on his old buddy Fillmore's doorstep. Fillmore is an accomplished clinical psychologist (and part-time bartender) whose own sanity is questionable at best. So it is only fitting when Fillmore suggests the solution to Brown's financial woes is for him to become a psychologist as well--albeit, not a licensed one. ("This is California, man. It doesn't matter.") "Dr. Brown" agrees. His first patient is a beautiful but unhappy woman who suspects her wealthy financier husband is plotting to kill her. Days later, she's found dead in a gorilla cage, her daughter goes missing, and Brown is hired to find her. The sportswriter-turned psychologist turns private detective. With the sardonic, oft-inebriated Fillmore at his side, Brown delves headfirst into what the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle praised as "a surreal, picaresque romp through the alienating landscape of contemporary culture."