He's baaack........ Joseph Wambaugh hits hard with another gritty cop story from his Hollywood Station series that moves 25 miles south all the way to the streets of San Pedro, LA's Harbor Town.
Like a tennis ball we bounce back and forth from chapter to chapter from Wambaugh's mainstay Hollywood cop characters, surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam on the midwatch, aspiring actor “Hollywood Nate” Weiss, with his new partner, Britney Small, and the not to be forgotten Chester Toles aka "Unicorn, to San Pedro where the young doper longshoreman Dinko Babich lives with his widowed mother Birgita in the nearby upscale community of Palos Verdes. Babich, a second generation Croat, works the docks but is currently on suspension for smoking weed on the job.
Soon bored and looking to score some dope in the Wilmington strip clubs, he does a favor for a friend and takes a young Mexican dancer, Lita Medina, to a Hollywood nightclub for an employment interview. The two "innocents" fall in love and get themselves involved with illegal alien trafficking.
The overworked and understaffed LAPD attempts to patrol an area with multiple ethnic street gangs and other residents made up of nationalities from Croatia, Serbia, Russian, Korea, China, Japan and Mexico, most of whom do not speak English.
It's pure Wambaugh and he doesn't hold his punches when it comes to longshoremen, Mexicans or any other "group" not blessed with his LAPD cop mentality. His gallows humor is the only thing that serves to lighten up his otherwise procedural style of writing.
Following "Hill Street Blues" award-winning formula, Wambaugh likes to embed stories he hears from cops, some funny, some not, in his mystery plots and spends quite a bit of time interviewing Detectives and the like from San Pedro's LAPD Harbor Division and the Port Police from the Port of LA for this book.
Remember folks, this is Fiction.
HuntingtonNews.Net Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - 17:37 by David M. Kinchen
Wambaugh born in East Pittsburgh, PA, in 1937, served as an LAPD detective from 1960 to 1974, when he quit to become a full-time writer of acclaimed novels and non-fiction books. He was in the Marine Corps before he joined the LAPD and has an associate of arts degree from Chaffey College in San Bernardino County and bachelor's and master's degrees from California State University, Los Angeles. The Hollywood Station series, which debuted in 2006 with "Hollywood Station", were the first fiction he had written about the LAPD since his novel "The Delta Star" in 1983. Wambaugh's a multiple New York Times best-selling author, two-time Edgar winner, and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. Known as “the father of the modern police novel,” he has written 14 novels and 5 works of nonfiction including "The Onion Field", "The New Centurions", and "The Choirboys", which were all made into feature films. He lives in Los Angeles. His website: http://www.josephwambaugh.net
Lee Dworshak was born and raised in Los Angeles and has spent the last 35 years raising a family in LA's Harbor Town, San Pedro. His wife Rose retired from the City of Los Angeles in 2011 with over 43 years of service; the last 23 were spent working for the City's Harbor Department at the Port of Los Angeles.
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