Hollywood Moon: A Novel

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Full of glimpses into the workings of low-level tech crime, bestseller Wambaugh's entertaining third Hollywood station novel (after Hollywood Crows) provides lots of laughs and gasps along with a few tender sighs. Trouble ensues after a husband-and-wife team of identity thieves, the weak-willed Dewey Gleason and his domineering mate, Eunice, cross paths with Malcolm Rojas, a creepy teenager with major anger-management issues. The heart of the story, though, comes from the vignettes of life on patrol among the cast of the station cops, including Hollywood Nate Weiss, the actor turned cop; Weiss's beautiful partner, Dana Vaughn; and the surfer duo, Flotsam and Jetsam, who at one point engage in a hilarious, extended dialogue of surfer-speak straight off the waves at Zuma. Spare and punchy prose fuels descriptions so on target that readers will feel they are riding shotgun, gazing out on Tinseltown's tawdry landscape. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review "[B]y turns hilarious, poignant and thrilling.... A meticulously realistic re-creation of cops' daily and, more important, inner lives.... One of the things that sets Wambaugh's cops and crooks apart from those in so many other mysteries and police procedurals is that he fixes both firmly in the same realistic social context.... The difference is that the cops, even in disillusion, retain something decent to which they can cling.... That constant is the spine that runs through Hollywood Moon as it has through all Wambaugh's LAPD novels. It's what allows you to find the black humor genuinely funny and to experience these masterful novels as something more than entertainment." (Los Angeles Times Tim Rutten )

"[W]hat other author could present cops, street people, and career criminals with such deadeye credibility? Or transpose slang up and out from the drug world into cop speak with absolutely perfect pitch? Only Wambaugh, former street cop and sergeant with the LAPD and author of 18 works of fiction and nonfiction..... In his latest, his fourteenth novel since the groundbreaking The New Centurions, the cops at Hollywood Station are trying to track a thug whose specialty is vicious attacks on women and various street criminals; in the process, the team sniffs out a high-tech scam. Crimes escalate and fun abounds." (Booklist )

"Full of glimpses into the workings of low-level tech crime, bestseller Wambaugh's entertaining third "Hollywood station" novel (after Hollywood Crows) provides lots of laughs and gasps along with a few tender sighs.... Spare and punchy prose fuels descriptions so on target that readers will feel they are riding shotgun, gazing out on Tinseltown's tawdry landscape." (Publishers Weekly )