It is Nunn's debut novel and tells the story of a young man searching for his missing sister in the dark underbelly of California surf culture.

[2][3][4] A stranger in a white Camaro with two surfboards strapped to the top arrives at a service station in the desert town of San Arco, California looking for Ike Tucker.

Ike keeps tabs on Hound and Terry Jacobs, following them one night to the surf shop and stumbling upon a meet-up between Preston and Frank Baker in the back alley.

The following day in a rare return to his previous life, Preston takes Ike on a road trip to a secret surf spot located just below a ranch near Santa Barbara.

Ike quickly gets sucked into Hound's seedy enterprises, helping to lure young runaway girls back to the surfer's home for drugs, sex and to be filmed in amateur porn.

Curious to know more, Barbara finds out that Janet had similarly gone missing on a trip to Mexico with Hound, Preston and the son of a rich Hollywood mogul, Milo Trax.

Preston unexpectedly disrupts the Satanic scene, wielding a gun and shooting everyone on site, allowing Ike and Michelle to flee to safety.

Frank confesses that he had told Preston about the murder rituals at Trax Ranch, which explained why the biker went there to save Ike and Michelle from a similar fate.

Kem Nunn's first attempts at writing were short stories based on people he knew from his hometown of Pomona in Los Angeles County.

[6] Towards the end of these self-proclaimed "lost years," Nunn took writing night classes at nearby Orange Coast College where he showed his stories to a substitute teacher.

[7] At age 30, after enrolling to get his undergraduate degree, Nunn was invited by Hall to sit in on the writing program at UC Irvine and continue to work on what would become the manuscript for Tapping the Source.

[12] At the time of the novel's publication, reviews were mixed on the plot but praised Nunn's talent as a budding novelist.The Washington Post described the book as a typical noir thriller containing "city boys with their dreams of 'tapping the source' through drugs or sex or surfing" and depicting "a world that is also fraught with touches of mysticism, as it is in [Robert] Stone and [Joan] Didion."

The review continues by stating "Nunn stays cooler with tone and calmer with pace than most first novelists" and "the book leaves you with a feeling you can savor for days," though critiques that when it comes to surfing and Harleys "Nunn seems to know what he's talking about [...] but when he introduces full-bore evil in the form of a rich guy who's into kinky sex and ritual murder, authenticity wavers" before finally conceding that "he may not yet have proved himself a master of the genre, but he has made his mark.

"[13] Kirkus Reviews stated that "Nunn demonstrates promising talent here – in stretches of quietly forceful narration" but criticizes that "he brings insufficient freshness, however, to a familiar, dated loss-of-innocence scenario – with the themes flatly announced at regular intervals.

[17][8] Upon subsequent reprints, online review sites like Crime Fiction Lover and The Rap Sheet heralded it as "one of the great American noir novels" and a "book you have to read," respectively.

[18][19] Shortly after its publication, the film rights to Tapping the Source were purchased by Martin Bregman at Universal Pictures, who was known for producing Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon and later Carlito's Way.

[21] The film was never made, but the rights deal earned Nunn considerably more than the book's royalties and allowed him to write his follow-up novel, Unassigned Territory.

[22] In 2019, it was reported that screenwriter Martin Helgeland was adapting the novel, overseen by Universal's Executive Vice President of Production, Matt Reilly, with Nunn also set to produce.