The chief social concern of Wambaugh's early novels might best be described as The Collapse of American Civilization as Embodied in the Moral Disintegration of Los Angeles, California. His cops were lonely centurions patrolling mean urban streets in the twilight of an empire. Since the 1980s, his novels have been somewhat less ambitious, focussing principally upon one selected aspect of the collapse of the culture. In The Glitter Dome (1981), it was Hollywood; in The Delta Star (1983), it was academics; in The Golden Orange (1990), it was the Orange County rich. In Finnegan's Week, it is environmentalism.

The crime which brings the three cop protagonists of Finnegan's Week together involves the illegal dumping of American toxic waste across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. A man and a boy die as a result of contact with the poison, Guthion; another boy is hospitalized. The villains appear at two levels...