Everything you need to understand or teach Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh.
Wambaugh's main theme is, as always, good vs. evil, with the cops embodying good and an assortment of criminals embodying evil. Good in Wambaugh's fiction is always flawed by weaknesses, usually weaknesses of the flesh, and sometimes tragic weaknesses; evil in Wambaugh's fiction is never banal, and often is exuberant and even zany. In his early novels, there was an element of hysteria in his depiction of the extremes of good and evil...