Joseph Wambaugh

Growing up in Los Angeles, John Orr would watch in awe as firefighters scrambled to put out blazes with seeming disregard for their own lives. One day he would become a fireman himself, and a good one. As a member of the Glendale Fire Department, he rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a fire captain and one of southern California's best-known and most-respected arson investigators, as well as a writer of firefighting articles and finally of...

A “darkly comic, gritty look at life on the streets” from the former LAPD detective and multiple New York Times bestseller (Publishers Weekly).
 
In the southernmost Los Angeles district of San Pedro, one of the world’s busiest harbors, an unlikely pair of lovers are unwittingly caught between the two warring sides of the law. When Dinko Babich, a young longshoreman, delivers Lita Medina, a young...

Bestseller Wambaugh's entertaining third Hollywood Station novel (after Hollywood Crows) provides lots of laughs and gasps from all of your favorite characters.
There's a saying at Hollywood station that the full moon brings out the beast — rather than the best — in the precinct's citizens. One moonlit night, LAPD veteran Dana Vaughn and "Hollywood" Nate Weiss, a struggling-actor-turned cop, get a call about a young man who's...

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's the wildest bar in Chinatown, run by a proprietor named Wing who will steal your bar change every chance he gets. On payday the groupies mingle there with off-duty LAPD cops, including homicide detectives Martin Welborn and Al Mackey, who get assigned the case of a murdered Hollywood studio boss who may have been involved in some very strange and dangerous filmmaking. Hilarious at times, heartbreaking at others.

In a super follow-up to Hollywood Station, Wambaugh returns to the beat he knows best, taking readers on a darkly funny ride-along with a cast of flawed LAPD cops and eccentric lowlifes you won't forget.
When LAPD cops Hollywood Nate and Bix Rumstead find themselves caught up with bombshell Margot Aziz, they think they're just having some fun. But in Hollywood, nothing is ever what it seems. To them, Margot is a harmless socialite, stuck...