I need to get out more | Hollywood Crows: A Novel

Joe does it again | Hollywood Crows: A Novel | Joseph Wambaugh

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	• Hollywood Crows: A Novel Joseph Wambaugh Little, Brown and Company, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 40 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It ain't Dragnet....

In movies and in books, sequels are commonplace, but sometimes they appear in unlikely places. There's never been a true sequel to a James Bond movie, merely subsequent movies featuring the same character, yet later this year, that rule will change with A Quantum of Solace, which directly follows up on Casino Royale. Similarly, Joseph Wambaugh has never really been one for sequels, but that has changed with Hollywood Crows, which features the further adventures of the cops of Hollywood Station.

Crows are the nickname given to cops who are part of the Community Relations Office, a division of the LAPD that focuses, naturally enough, on developing a better relationship with the community. The Crows focus on quality-of-life complaints such as noise violations. Two of the Hollywood Station cops have moved on to the CRO: Ronnie Sinclair, a well-meaning policewoman who needs to transfer out of her current job and "Hollywood" Nate Weiss, who's more interested in being a movie star than cleaning up the streets.

As with many of Wambaugh's books, this book is more character-driven than plot driven as it deals with many cop characters and their adventures and misadventures. For example, there are the two surfer cops known as Flotsam and Jetsam, the hard-hitting Gert Von Braun and the rookie Gilberto Ponce who can't convince anyone he's not Hispanic. Gone but not forgotten was the mentor and unofficial leader of the station, the Oracle. Instead, there is now the supervisor Sergeant Treakle, a bureaucrat who screws up every time he tries to anything cop-like.

There is a plot, however, involving the nasty divorce between Ali and Margot Aziz. Ali is a shady nightclub owner who recruits a drug-addled petty thief to burglarize Margot's home, though there is a more sinister agenda afoot. The beautiful Margot has schemes of her own, part of which involves seducing Hollywood Nate, and if that doesn't work, using another cop instead.

Prior to writing Hollywood Station, Wambaugh had a long hiatus from novel writing. That book showed he wasn't rusty and the sequel shows that the quality wasn't a fluke. Hollywood Crows is another top-notch novel sure to please both those new to Wambaugh and his old fans as well. With plenty of dark humor and suspense, this is crime fiction at its best.

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I need to get out more

HOLLYWOOD CROWS is Joseph Wambaugh's sequel to Hollywood Station, both darkly humorous novels featuring the cops of the LAPD's Hollywood Division. Mind you, I drive through the district and cross Hollywood Boulevard twice a day to and from the 9 to 5. I never think of the place as glamorous or gritty, but only as a potential traffic snarl, especially when the Kodak Theater is prepping for an event such as the Academy Awards. So, when Wambaugh's characters include the whack jobs and petty crooks that hang around Grauman's Chinese, I guiltily think that I need to get out more to experience the native culture. (I have been to the Hollywood Farmers' Market held at Ivar and Selma; it's pretty cool, and I'm surprised Wambaugh hasn't included that weekly Sunday event for local color.)

Both books essentially revolve around the beat's uniformed cops. HOLLYWOOD CROWS brings front and center the officers of the division's Community Relations Office (CRO, or "Crows") who, with their anti-crime brothers and sisters in blue, react to the area's underbelly of violence, weirdness, and general antisocial tendencies. Specifically, the Crows confront "quality of life issues: chronic-noise complaints, graffiti, homeless encampments, abandoned shopping carts, unauthorized yard sales, and aggressive panhandlers."

As I remember, HOLLYWOOD STATION was a series of vignettes starring several of the author's fictional heroes as they "serve and protect", i.e. keep the lid on, in the face of assorted provocations. HOLLYWOOD CROWS is that too, but it also includes a substantial subplot involving a CRO officer with an Achilles heel and the deviously plotting, estranged wife of the owner of a local nudie bar. Perhaps because this subplot interrupted the flow of the rest of the book, I wasn't enamored of the whole as much as I was with the first of the two. Four stars, therefore. Perhaps I'm just getting bored with a concept that's already showing staleness around the edges. Perhaps I should go walk Hollywood Boulevard and window shop the slutty lingerie emporiums; the wife's birthday is coming up.

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Joe does it again

Hollywood Crows is the second Wambaugh novel that follows a group of Police Officers in the Hollywood Station. Once again it tears the top off Hollywood culture and shows the seething underbelly of criminals and down and outs who prey on anybody they can. It also highlights the turmoil of a Police Dept trying to be everything to everybody, an impossibility, but the "feel good" administration won't hear what everyone is telling them.

The charecters are extremely well defined and believable, especially if you have been a Police Officer, we can relate to them all.

Well done Joe, another great book added to my collection. I await your next..

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Wambaugh near the top of his game

After reading "Hollywood Station" and being disappointed, I was reluctant to pick up "Hollywood Crows." But, I'm glad I did.

Hollywood Crows are actually CROs (Community Relations Officers). They deal with "quality of life issues" and are often considered "teddy bears in blue." Many cops consider it a "sissy beat" and Crows as less than "real cops."

Wambaugh keeps the same police officers and venue from Hollywood Station, but delivers a much stronger plot. A bitter divorce and custody battle between strip club owner Ali Aziz and his beautiful dancer wife, Margot, drives the story. Several of the Crows and Leonard Stilwell, a two-bit criminal, become entangled in the mess.

Wambaugh keeps the reader guessing about how deeply a couple of the Crows will get involved and how the story will end. Unlike "Hollywood Station," I couldn't wait to see how the book ended.

This is a strong, satisfying effort from Wambaugh. It's much more along the lines of what I expect from this great author.

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Ed McBain Lives!

After an absence of about a decade, Joseph Wambaugh -- the Ed McBain of Los Angeles -- has returned at the top of his game.

Wambaugh's police procedurals, like those of his contemporary McBain, are an absolute delight to read. The spot-on character profiles of each of the policemen and women of Hollywood Station, the pitch perfect dialogue and the neck-snapping plot switches from tragedy to farce and back again make this book a riveting page turner. I read it cover to cover on a flight from Boise to Baltimore, and felt a little bereft at the end because it came all too soon. But I can quickly cure what ails me by reading the prequel, Hollywood Station.

As for the plot, there is a central story regarding an estranged husband and wife who -- actually, there's no way to describe their story without giving too much away. Read, savor, be surprised. But also take the time to relish the numerous mini-dramas scattered throughout the book.

Hollywood Crows will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you pause and think about the human condition. In short, it will do everything a great book should do. And to think, it is "just" a police procedural!

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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: the femme fatale is setting them both up. But Ms. Aziz isn't the only one with a deadly plan.
In HOLLYWOOD CROWS, Wambaugh returns once again to the beat he knows best, taking readers on a tightly plotted and darkly funny ride-along through Los Angeles with a cast of flawed cops and eccentric lowlifes they won't soon forget.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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