High speed laser sensing?
While I don't know all the design or budgetary constraints of your problem, from the technical point of view it should be very doable. 
I would find a narrow bandpass optical filter (with the center of the band at the wavelength of the laser) that I would place in front of my optical detector to filter out all the stray light. While APD (or even a PMT) would give you the best results, optical PIN diode (check Hamamatsu diodes) would suffice for your application. You just need to follow it with a good quality amplifier.

As to the research material, I would look up stuff on the design of flow cytometers or other flouresence detection systems. These instruments are able to detect much weaker optical signals at a rate of 10k events/second.