All Companions Sink (November 2013) is Bob Laird's fourth novel, taking up the story of Marlon Brando Plover, the main character in Not That Far, Laird's second novel, eleven years later when Plover has somehow become director of admissions at UC Berkeley. The novel opens on the day in July 1995 that the University of California Regents end affirmative action in UC Admissions. Partly comic in tone, the book is the story of an important institution under great legal and political pressure and the acts of betrayal, cowardice, and, occasionally, courage that result as Plover is forced to confront the competing factions and often unstable individuals within that bureaucracy.