Ex-cop turned #1 New York Times bestselling writer Joseph Wambaugh forged a new kind of literature with his great early police procedurals. Here in his classic debut novel, Wambaugh presents a stunning, raw, and unforgettable depiction of life behind the thin blue line.





In a class of new police recruits, Augustus Plebesly is fast and scared. Roy Fehler is full of ideals. And Serge Duran is an ex-marine running away from his Chicano childhood. In a few weeks they'll put on the blue uniform of the LAPD. In months they'll know how to interpret the...

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,...

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.

Partners in the Los Angeles Police Department, they're haunted by terrifying dark secrets of the nightwatch-shared predawn drink and sex sessions they call choir practice. Each wears his cynicism like a bulletproof jockstrap-each has his horror story, his bad dream, his night shriek. He is afraid of his friends-he is afraid of himself.

He is a damned good cop--a burned-out homicide detective wrapped around a Smith & Wesson .38 and a vodka bottle. She is his partner--twice divorced, nursing a grudge against men, obsessed by the awful temptation of love.

Praise for The Black Marble

" Joseph] Wambaugh sidesteps all the cliches."--Baltimore Sun

"Superb . . . his best book "--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"First-rate . . . fast, colorful, and gripping . . . as touching as it is breathlessly entertaining."--Cosmopolitan

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Raucous cops, outlaw bikers, and suntanned celebrities collide in a steamy landscape swirling with natural beauty and unnatural death.

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 as an investigation sandwiched between golf games in nearby Palm Springs quickly...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - When a pair of lowlife thieves cross the border into Tijuana, three tenacious cops cross the line.

Fin Finnegan is a San Diego police detective and wannabe actor who's passing midlife crisis and heading straight for midlife meltdown. The last thing he wants when he's gearing up for a TV audition is a routine truck theft case. The last thing he needs after three messy divorces is a sexy female investigator assigned to the case. Fin's abysmal luck is holding out--he's got not only the theft investigation but an uneasy alliance with two strong-willed...

The true story only Joseph Wambaugh could tell. A band of California cops set loose in no-man's-land to come home heroes. Or come home dead.

Not since Joseph Wambaugh's bestselling The Onion Field has there been a true police story as fascinating, as totally gripping as Lines and Shadows. The media hailed them as heroes. Others denounced them as lawless renegades. A squad of tough cops called the Border Crime Task Force. A commando team sent to patrol the snake-infested no-man's-land south of San Diego. Not to apprehend the thousands of illegal aliens slipping into...

Fifteen-year-old Lynda Mann's savagely raped and strangled body is found along a shady footpath near the English village of Narborough. Though a massive 150-man dragnet is launched, the case remains unsolved. Three years later the killer strikes again, raping and strangling teenager Dawn Ashforth only a stone's throw from where Lynda was so brutally murdered. But it will take four years, a scientific breakthrough, the largest manhunt in British crime annals, and the blooding of more than four thousand men before the real killer is found.

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 in the middle of an ugly divorce from the nefarious nightclub-owner Ali Aziz. What Nate and Bix don't know is that Margot's no helpless victim:...