Hollywood Station

By: Joseph Wambaugh

Narrated by: Adam Grupper

For a cop, a night on the job means killing time and trying not to get killed. If you're a cop in Hollywood Division, it also means dealing with the most overwrought, desperate, and deluded criminals anywhere. When you're patrolling Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, neither a good reputation nor the lessons of scandals past will help you keep your cool, your sanity, or your life when things heat up.The robbery of a Hollywood jewelry store, complete with masks and a hand grenade, quickly connects to a Russian nightclub, an undercover operation gone bloodily wrong, and a cluelessly ambitious pair of tweakers.

Putting the pieces together are the sergeant they call the Oracle and his squad of street cops. There's Budgie Polk, a twenty-something firecracker with a four-month-old at home, and Wesley Drubb, a rich boy who joined the force seeking thrills. Fausto Gamboa is the tetchy veteran, and Hollywood Nate is the one who never shuts up about movies. They spend their days in patrol cars and their nights in the underbelly of a city that never sleeps. From their headquarters at Hollywood Station, they see the glamour city for what it is: a field of land mines, where the mundane is dangerous and the dangerous is mundane.

Excellent

Great listen/book. Believable intertwined plots, and Adam Grupper's reading is superb;very fluid and his instant use of different voices for the different charcters gives the reading a "movie" type feel. GOOD JOB ADAM!!

Wambaugh does it again

You would have to have been a policeman who worked teh streets of Hollywood for the LAPD to fully appreciate this story. I was and I do.

Chuck

I think the old master has returned. Yes, this is better than his last and approaches to the level of his novel entitled "Lines and Shadows." The story is a must read!

Hollywood Insider - Narrator Saves the Day

I have to agree with the other reviewer who talked about this book getting off to a slow start. I was not impressed with the depiction of the characters or the different plots as they began. Towards the middle of the book the pace and character development and pace picked up but it never got to any great level of satisfaction for me. The end felt rushed, predictable and anticlimactic. As usual Adam saved the book with his presentation. It is a good book if you are in to cop stories about cops without a true "mystery" in the works. At the end of the day, had I bought this book in paper form I would have tossed it out after the first chapter.

He's Back!

This book ROCKS! This is a wonderful representation of classic Joseph Wambaugh. Funny and gritty. The LAPD cops in this book are real people not the shallow righteous crime fighters of TV and movies. I LOVED this old school style Wambaugh novel and I can't recommend it too much!