Hollywood Moon (Hollywood Station Series #3) » (~)

Joseph Wambaugh, a former LAPD detective sergeant, is the bestselling author of 18 prior works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Choirboys and The Onion Field. In 2004, he was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in southern California.

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, veteran officers Dana Vaughn and "Hollywood" Nate Weiss get a call about a prowler who's been brutally attacking women. Meanwhile, a pair of cops with the surfer sobriquets Flotsam and Jetsam are on the lookout for a smooth-talking player in dreads and a crazy-eyed, tattooed biker. But something bigger, more high-tech, and much more deadly is about to go down. After a dizzying series of twists, turns, and chases, the cops discover that they've stumbled upon a complex web of crime where even the criminals aren't sure who's conning whom. And for some of the men and women in blue, public duty will exact the heaviest of tolls.

Publishers Weekly

For the final and arguably best entry in his Hollywood trilogy (after Hollywood Station and Hollywood Crows), Wambaugh takes listeners on “a cops-eye ride along the boulevard of broken dreams” through all manner of police eccentricities and heroism, brutal violence, gallows humor, romance, marital discord, and a jaw-dropping study of the ins and outs of identity theft. Christian Rummel, his partner on the ride, translates the vivid prose into something resembling an audio play. He's already honed the voices of such characters as detective Hollywood Nate Weiss and the surfer cop team, Flotsam and Jetsam, but they're refined: Nate sounds a little more grounded, the surfers more subtly spacey. Plus there's a cast of new characters to play with—creepy ID thieves; henpecked and delusional Dewey Gleason and his chain-smoking, gravel-voiced wife, Eunice; and the chilling teenage serial rapist and prospective murderer, Malcolm Rojas. Wambaugh sets a swift pace as he drives his cops and criminals toward each other and an inevitable collision, and Rummel has no trouble keeping up, adding his own spin around the novel's hairpin turns. A Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 28). (Nov.)