Hollywood Crows: A Novel
by Joseph Wambaugh
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joseph WambaughEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-25
ISBN: 0316025283
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Product features:
- First Edition
- Collectible
- Hardback
- Dust cover
Book Reviews of Hollywood Crows: A Novel
Book Review: "This ain't the city of the angels, it's the city of angles, where everybody's looking for an edge."
Summary: 3 Stars
In his waning years of productivity, the author who so beautifully portrayed the real story of the LAPD in The New Centurions, The Choirboys and The Onion Field, is keeping his hand in a strange brew of bureaucracy, politics and modern police work in this follow-up to Hollywood Station. Sprinkling the cast with some of the same eccentrics, denizens of Hollywood and connecting areas, this novel makes a half-hearted stab at the cop humor sustaining a profession that deals daily with unsavory conditions and the human suffering that attends poverty, petty criminal enterprise and a city struggling to survive a hostile environment. The Hollywood Crows are a special team assigned to the Community Relations Office, sometimes referred to as "the sissy patrol" or "the teddy bears in blue" because the risk in this work is much lower than regular tours of duty.
Granted, the streets are just as crazy, regardless of police presence: the "Characters" who inhabit Hollywood's Walk of Fame, charging tourists for photographs, making surreptitious drug deals to pad their meager profits, a breeding ground for pickpockets and other scam artists; the walk-in tanning salons that front a vigorous trade in "human services"; the ubiquitous strip clubs; the fast food venues (another place to score); and the helpless frustrations of lower income working people forced to live among the fringe-dwellers. Some of these cops mix in well, particularly Flotsam and Jestsam, muscular, tanned surfers who live for the waves, an unpopular supervisor known as "chicken lips" and "Hollywood Nate" Weiss, who proudly carries his new SAG card with his police identification. Newly assigned to the CROWS, Veronica Sinclair is paired with veteran Bix Ramstead, who may be the only monogamous cop left in LA.
Two by two, training officers and rookies and the street-smart regulars ride the streets for their daily portion of law enforcement. There are really no stars in this novel, only a wide cast of personalities, cops and citizens and the events that bring them all to one tragic moment of reckoning of shock and grief, before moving on to the next shift in a fantasy landscape that promises more than it ever delivers. Hollywood is, after all, only a city like many others, crime and problem infested, riddled with cons and criminals, everyone looking for a break. No better or worse than Las Vegas or Miami. But these are Wambaugh's people, albeit a bit frayed around the edges (Dare I say "long in the tooth?"). Clinging to what he knows best, the author's forced humor fails to disguise a weary cynicism, a tacit acknowledgment of the infinite ways people can devise to harm one another and those around them. Luan Gaines/ 2008.
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