Showing results by author "Joseph Wambaugh" in All Categories

Outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Batman has assaulted Spider-Man. Marilyn Monroe reported the crime and three Elvises witnessed it. It's business as usual for the cops out of Hollywood Station. But while they deal with the costumed crack-heads, prostitutes, purse snatchers, and ordinary lunatics that haunt the boulevards, in the streets behind the lights and crowds, the real Los Angeles simmers, never far from boiling point.

Fin Finnegan, a San Diego police detective and wannabe actor heading straight for a midlife meltdown, is assigned a routine truck theft that turns into a toxic chemical spill, setting off a bizarre chain reaction of death and murder on both sides of the Mexican border. Fin is forced to team up with Nell Salter, a sexy female investigator, as well as an equally fetching U.S. Navy investigator who wants to learn all that Fin can teach her - and that’s saying a lot

Crows (Community Relations Officers) have it easy handling "the sissie beat": Hollywood's domestic disputes, over-excited paparazzi, and chronic complainers. At least, that's the way it seems. But in Hollywood - where Mickey Mouse is a crack addict and Marilyn Monroe is a man - things are rarely what they seem.

LAPD veteran "Hollywood Nate" Weiss could take or leave the opulence, but he wouldn't say no to onscreen fame. He may get his shot when he catches the appreciative eye of B-list director Rudy Ressler, and his troublemaking fiance, Leona Brueger, the older-but-still-foxy widow of a processed-meat tycoon. Nate tries to elude her crafty seductions, but consents to keep an eye on their estate in the Hollywood Hills while they're away.

In his finest, most compelling blend of wild humor and powerful drama, Joseph Wambaugh leads us into the Hollywood scene to demonstrate the effects of that heady, amoral world on four sets of police partners enmeshed in the glamour and the grime, the hustle and the horror. They live and work in a dizzying mix of moguls and starlets, elaborate parties, outrageous and sordid actions; a place where sex and drugs are open and the big deals are undercover.

In San Pedro, Los Angeles, one of the world's busiest harbours, an unlikely pair of lovers is caught up in terror. When Dinko Babich, a young longshoreman, delivers Lita Medina, a young Mexican dancer, from the harbour to a Hollywood nightclub, his life is forever changed as an unexpectedly tender and moving love story develops. Comedy and tragedy are intertwined in the everyday life of the cops and residents of San Pedro Harbor.

Under-staffed and over-worked, bound by red tape and hobbled by political correctness, the men and women of Hollywood Station hold the front line in LA's epicentre. But add a diamond robbery, the Russian mafia and a cluelessly ambitious...glass freak, and something has got to give.