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LINES AND SHADOWS, 1984
Not since his first work of nonfiction, The Onion Field, has there been a true police story as gripping as Lines and Shadows, a fascinating and deeply layered account of one of the most controversial police experiments in recent history.
The media hailed them as heroes. Others denounced them as renegades who overstepped the shadowy boundary between law and justice. They were the Border Crime Task Force, a squad of San Diego police officers who nightly prowled the explosive international border. Their mission was to stalk the ruthless bandits who preyed upon the thousands of illegal aliens crossing from Mexico into the United States under cover of darkness. The police disguised themselves as aliens to lure the bandits into the open--a ruse that proved all too ffective as they confronted the murderous shadows of the night.
In this true story of lawmen and bandits, Wambaugh re-creates the myth of the Western hero--the isolation and exhilaration of a handful of men attempting to tame a strange and dangerous frontier. But as the mission envelops their lives, their loves, even their sanity, the true border proves to be within each man: that sinister line a few men dare to cross at utter peril.
CRITICS PRAISE
“Wambaugh is a writer of genuine power, style, wit and originality, who has chosen to write about the police in particular as a means of expressing his views on society in general.” Evan Hunter, The New York Times Book Review
“An uncommon talent for superior story-telling.” The New Yorker
“Wambaugh is an author as confident of his effects and as firmly in control of tones and tensions as a James M. Cain or a John O’Hara. He is a great storyteller whose stories delineate a world nearly too real.” Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times
“God bless Joseph Wambaugh...his prose can hold you breathless.” Elmore Leonard, Chicago Sunday Sun-Times
“Joseph Wambaugh’s characters have altered America’s view of its police. His Los Angeles officers are...ordinary, besieged working men and women whose lives are presented with war-zone humor, lively plots and a refreshing lack of night-school sociology.” J.D. Reed, Time
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