Hollywood Moon

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.)