Joseph Wambaugh Books

Hollywood Station: While the cops out of Hollywood Station deal with the costumed crackheads, prostitutes, purse snatchers, tweakers and everyday lunatics that haunt the boulevards, in the streets behind the lights and crowds, the real Los Angeles simmers, never far from boiling point. The New Centurions: The story of five years in the lives of three policemen, from boot camp to the bitter realities of patrolling the streets of Los Angeles The Blue Knight: Bumper Morgan is a cop with twenty years' service under his belt and retirement looming. His outlook is old-fashioned: he believes in justice - even when it doesn't conform to the letter of the law. If a judicious bit of violence will give him what he needs to solve a crime, so be it. That's the way the game's played. And it usually works. But the prospect of retirement is clouding Bumper's judgement and he finds himself making mistakes. The kind of mistakes that kill people.

When forty-year-old cop Winnie Farlowe lost his  shield, he lost the only protection he had. Ever  since, he's been fighting a bad back, fighting the  bottle, fighting his conscience. But now he's in  for a special fight. Never before has he come up  against anyone like Tess Binder. She's a  stunningly beautiful, sexually spirited three-time  divorcee from Newport Beach--capital of California's  Golden Orange, where wallets are fat, bikinis are  skimpy, and cosmetic surgery is one sure way to a  billionaire's bank account. Nearly a year ago Tess  Binder's father washed up on the beach with a bullet  in his ear. The coroner called it suicide, but to  Tess it means the fear of her own fate. And  Winnie Farlowe is a man willing to follow wherever she  leads--straight into the juicy pulp of the Golden  Orange, a world where money is everything, but  nothing adds up . . . where death and chicanery  flourish amidst ranches, mansions, and yachting  parties. In his long-awaited new novel, best-selling  author Joseph Wambaugh combines harrowing suspense,  scathing humor, and a moving portrait of a man on  the brink of  self-destruction.

Wambaugh returns to the beat he knows best, taking readers on a tightly plotted and darkly funny ride through Los Angeles's epicentre with a cast of flawed cops and eccentric lowlifes they won't soon forget.

This is the frighteningly true story of two young cops and two young robbers whose separate destinies fatally cross one march night in a bizarre execution in a deserted Los Angeles field.

Joseph Wambaugh explores a phenomenon that is attracting increasing national attention, the wave of immigration from Mexico across the southwestern United States border, in "Lines and Shadows". A nonfiction work that the New York Times Book Review called "his best book yet," "Lines and Shadows" leads you into the desperate, frightening world of illegal aliens and the vicious bandits who terrorize them. The cops who pose as aliens to break up the bandit ring find themselves crossing and recrossing the unclear lines between law and justice, real life and dangerous myth.

Chronicles the first homicide cases to be solved by DNA testing: the 1983 and 1986 rape-murders of English teenagers Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashforth.

Ex-cop turned #1 New York Times bestselling writer Joseph Wambaugh forged a new kind of literature with his great early police procedurals. Gritty, luminous, and ultimately stunning, this novel is Wambaugh at his best—a tale of a street cop on the hardest beat of his life. Twenty and two. Those are the numbers turning in the mind of William "Bumper" Morgan: twenty years on the job, two days before he "pulls the pin" and walks away from it forever. But on the gritty streets of L.A., people look at Bumper like some kind of knight in armor—they've plied him with come-ons, hot tips, and the hard respect a man can't earn anywhere else. Now, with a new job and a good woman waiting for him, a kinky thief terrorizing L.A.'s choice hotels, and a tragedy looming, Bumper Morgan is about to face the only thing that can scare him: the demons that he's been hiding behind his bright and shiny badge...

A cheap hooker named Missy Moonbeam takes a fatal dive from the roof of a sleazy hotel. But what's a Caltech phone number doing in her trick book? And how does that connect to a dead private eye and a useless credit card? And what does all that have to do with a Whisky-class Russian sub and the Nobel Prize?

Ex Longshoreman and taxi driver Dink Babich tries to protect a dancer after she witnesses something that links her to the murder of 13 people.

While the cops out of Hollywood station deal with the costumed crackheads, prostitutes, purse snatchers, tweakers 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.Under the watchful eye of the veteran sergeant they call Oracle, the Hollywood station squad are as different as the streets they police. Budgie Polk's back on duty while still breast-feeding her son, begrudgingly teamed with old school patrol officer Fausto Gamboa. Flotsam and Jetsam live only for surfing and the petite - but intrepid - Meg Takara. Andi McCrea goes off duty and into night classes, while rich kid rookie Wesley Drubb is as desperate to see some action as Nathan 'Hollywood' Weiss is to get his script developed.Under-staffed and over-worked, bound by red tape and hobbled by political correctness, these men and women 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...

A.M. Valnikov is an embittered alcoholic Los Angeles cop. Natalie Zimmerman, an attractive and uncompromising policewoman, is given the job of pulling him together, and the ill-suited couple stumble into a bizarre and brutal extortion case. The author's other books include "The Onion Field".

Seventeen months ago the California desert revealed the remains of Jack Watson. The rich man's son was found incinerated in a Rolls-Royce, a bullet in his head. Now, a year and a half later, Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Sidney Blackpool is called into the desert to take on the case. But what begins for Blackpool is an investigation sandwiched between golf games in nearby Palm Springs quickly becomes an obsession.

The story of ten cops working the nightwatch out of Wiltshire Division in Los Angeles. Off duty they attend choir practice, a euphemism for the orgies of drink, food and sex that help them to escape the emotional torture of police work.

On June 25, 1989, the naked corpse of schoolteacher Susan Reinert was found wedged into her hatchback car in a hotel parking lot near Philadelphia's "Main Line."  Her two children had vanished.  The Main Line Murder Case burst upon the headlines--and wasn't resolved for seven years.  Now, master crime writer Joseph Wambaugh reconstructs the case from its roots, recounting the details, drama, players and pawns in this bizarre crime that shocked the nation and tore apart a respectable suburban town.  The massive FBI and state police investigation ultimately centered on two men.  Dr. Jay C. Smith--By day he was principal of Upper Merion High School where Susan Reinert taught.  At night he was a sadist who indulged in porno, drugs, and weapons.  William Bradfield--He was a bearded and charismatic English teacher and classics scholar, but his real genius was for juggling women--three at a time.  One of those women was Susan Reinert.  How these two men are connected, how the brilliant murder was carried off, and how the investigators closed this astounding case makes for Wambaugh's most compelling book yet.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLSER • “This is vintage Wambaugh, a rollicking and ribald tale, laced with black humor.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune Harbor cops Fortney and Leeds have a good time patrolling San Diego’s Mission Bay, scopingout body-sculpted beauties on pleasure craft, rescuing boating bozos who’ve run aground, and haulingin the occasional floater. But now their days are anything but typical, for theAmerica’s Cup regattas have come to town and San Diego swarms with sailors, schemers, spies, and saboteurs,and the cuppies who want to love them. It’s a randy cuppie named Blaze who tweaks their cop instincts thatsomething’s not quite right on the waterfront—and it’sBlaze who sets off a bizarre criminal trail that wouldbe hilarious if it didn’t wind up just as nasty asit gets, with a pair of murders right on the eve of thebiggest sailing race of all. Praise for Floaters “There’s only one Joe Wambaugh. He’s a really important American writer.”—Jonathan Kellerman “[Wambaugh] dazzles with his intimate knowledge of police life, black humor, raunchy dialogue, and a cast of nineties choirboys. . . . A cop’s expertise and the literary power of a master storyteller.”—Digby Diehl, Playboy “The author’s trademark sardonic writing is in full force here.”—Publishers Weekly

The death of an innocent child. A drum of lethal pesticide. A hardboiled veteran cop. From the sleazemongers of San Diego's biker bars to the mastermind behind a toxic waste business to the killing streets of Tijuana. Wambaugh--ex-cop-turned-bestselling author--is at his best.

In San Diego findet der Admiral's Cup statt, das älteste Segelrennen der Welt. Die Neuseeländer wollen den Titelverteidiger besiegen. Ambrose Lutterworth, der Hüter des Cups, plant mit der verführerischen Blaze Duvall, doch zwei Morde am Vorabend des Rennens bedrohen seinen Plan.

Un uomo in fuga nel deserto di Palm Springs. Eludente, minaccioso e imprendibile

Übersetzung Sepp Leeb

Tatsachen-Roman über den 1. Mordfall der Welt, der mit Hilfe des genetischen Fingerabdrucks gelöst wurde.

[Der Autor] hat ... den bis heute ungeklärten Mord an der Lehrerin Susan Reinert aufgerollt und mit psychologischem Geschick zu einem literarisch überzeugenden authentischen Roman verarbeitet"--Jacket.

Margot Aziz bringt Abwechslung in Hollywood-Nates Polizeialltag, der von verrückten Junkies und drogendealenden Toons geprägt ist. Doch in Hollywood ist nichts wie es scheint: Margot ist kein hilfsbedürftiges Wesen, sondern gefährlich.

Butterworth, Titelverteidiger des America's Cup, versucht mit allen Mitteln die favorisierten Neuseeländer aus dem Rennen zu schiessen. Da geschehen am Tag vor dem Rennen zwei Morde. Thriller aus dem Segelsportmilieu

In "Impronta di sangue" ("The Blooding", 1989) il tema è fornito dalla scoperta, da parte dell'inglese Alee Jeffreys, del modello genetico, cioè delle particolari caratteristiche del DNA, diverse da individuo a individuo e assolutamente irripetibili. Da una goccia di sangue o di sperma è divenuto così possibile risalire all'identità di una persona, con un grado di sicurezza tale da rendere obsoleto il tradizionale metodo delle impronte digitali. Si può ricorrere al "fingerprinting" genetico per stabilire la compatibilità ereditaria, la tipologia dei gemelli, ma anche per scoprire un assassino. Di questa insolita collaborazione tra genetica e codice penale, Wambaugh ci offre un esempio da manuale, ricavato dagli annali giudiziari della corte inglese.