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.