Author Description

Seduction, black-market booze, burglary, and murder-not your ordinary fare for a division of peacekeeping officers, but Hollywood isn't your ordinary town. When a couple of LAPD cops find themselves caught up with a certain femme fatale, they're in for trouble. Meet Margot Aziz, the beautiful, soon-to-be-ex wife of Ali Aziz, proprietor of a Sunset Boulevard strip club. Ali has his diamond-studded fingers in multiple shady business deals-and he wants his lovely wife dead. Enter Hollywood Nate Weiss, a cop hungry for stardom and looking for love. Nate works alongside a squad of L.A.'s finest, including a duo of suntanned surfer cops, two tenacious women officers, and a wily veteran. As they all discover, Hollywood always deceives you, and love always comes packing heat. The Barnes & Noble Review Joseph Wambaugh did not invent the police novel, but no one had seen anything like The New Centurions when it was published in 1971. Here was a working, living, breathing cop with a decade of experience on the beat. Here was a detective sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department telling stories from his own experience instead of from the usual remove of a novelist mixing make-believe with a little bit of research. Wambaugh's cops were neither heroes nor villains but men who gave as much to the job as the job gave back. The relationship he traced between humanity and authority could be symbiotic, but more often the wear and tear of pointless crime, binge drinking, and failing marriages coalesced into a Molotov cocktail's worth of potential conflict awaiting the match.