A street-weary former cop tracks a mysterious girl through the crowds and crises of a San Francisco Bay area twenty-five years into the zombie era. Deceased and Residing in Oakland is a mystery thriller in the tradition of American Crime Fiction, set twenty-five years after the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. San Francisco is a city under siege -- it's heaving with refugees and it's seething with crime -- but it's still a city. It's got cops and courts and commerce, and it's got one burned out cop in particular living a careful life a bay away from the rot that still stalks the suburbs, looking for a heartbeat. All he wants is a quiet life, but when he's hired to track down the mysterious daughter of one of the city's elite and the case starts killing his friends, he's forced on a high-velocity ride among the eccentric citizens and dangerous diversions of fortress San Francisco and all the way back to the last place he ever wants to be. The hard-boiled narrative is fast and funny and it reads like something you'd expect from Raymond Chandler, if he wrote zombie books: "His nose spread itself across his face like an inadequate police cordon trying to hold back an ugly mob." ".a dress that flowed over her body like mist from a dry ice machine.

It made me hope for a stiff wind." "The accompanying silence only meant that somewhere a saxophone was missing its cue." "He looked like a man trying to reach the handle of the knife in his back." "And once again the gods of getting punched in the face had picked my name out of the hat." ".a relic of an ostentatious past that looks like a myth from down here in the rubble." "Exactly. People are always rushing to be the first to point out the sign that we've finally screwed things up for the last time.

It's the perverse instinct of the self-loathing man." And so on like that, discovering and dispensing with a cast of eccentrics including drug-abusing pirates, one-armed barkeeps, mad professors with a Nietzschean perspective on the zombie apocalypse and suburbanites who are just trying to keep a decent wine cellar.