Wambaugh has deliberately avoided tying his novels to one another. There are no series protagonists; there are no recurring characters at all. Since he abandoned Los Angeles, even the scenes of his novels seem to be conscientiously varied. The novels of the 1990s have tended to focus on the more upscale social environments of Southern California. The cop protagonists of these novels have, of course, remained middle class, but even they tend to have milder characters. Floaters (1996) continues this trend. The special setting of Floaters is the America's Cup race held off San Diego in 1994. In the 1970s, Wambaugh's fiction produced an anatomy of the big American city in the process of collapse into violence and moral chaos. In the 1990s, the novels are producing a portrait of the moral chaos (and, to a lesser degree, the violence) that lies beneath the rich, sunny surface of...