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In Hollywood, the best drama doesn’t always take place in the film studios. Often, it takes place in Hollywood Station, where movie posters decorate the walls and the officers often spend their free time working as extras in the movies. Each day, Hollywood’s finest come together, under the guidance of a wise old sergeant known only as the Oracle, to patrol the dirty, crime-filled streets and hunt down criminals whose stories are often more fantastic than the movies filmed right down the street.
Hollywood Station follows a team of Hollywood cops as they go out each night and try to keep the streets safe, no matter what it takes. They investigate crimes that are seemingly unrelated, not knowing that these crimes are more related than the criminals realize. The greasy, strung out addict and his toothless girlfriend may seem like just another couple of small-time tweakers, running their small-time jobs to get the money for another hit. But when their usual mail scam leads them to some valuable information that helps one of their customers pull an unusually lucrative heist, the small-time addicts find that they could be entering the big-time.
While it focuses mainly on the Hollywood cops, this novel also takes a close look at the other side of the law—the small-time crooks and the big-time mobsters that work together to keep the crime rates high on the streets of Hollywood. The story skips around, allowing readers to get to know both the cops and the crooks. And while it’s telling the main story through the eyes of both groups, it also throws in plenty of wacky Hollywood crime stories as a bonus. While the extras may be interesting, they’re not always as wacky as you might expect. Sometimes, in fact, they’re just plain horrifying. And they’re often distracting, taking the reader’s attention away from the main story for no apparent reason.
The characters, however, are what makes this story. While the story may meander more than I’d like, Wambaugh does an excellent job of characterization. He makes both the cops and the crooks come to life and climb off the page. So if you love a story with strong characters, you’ll love meeting the characters in this novel about the seedy underbelly of the place known as Hollyweird. Just don’t expect a solid, focused story.
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