The Golden Orange (1990), Wambaugh's novel after five years of not publishing, shares with his nonfiction works on crime the conviction that criminals have sociopathic personalities that are incurable. He reminds us of the viciousness of these criminals in a scene in which a tape of a tortured child's screams is played. The murderer made the tape for his own enjoyment.

The California setting is familiar from Wambaugh's previous works; The Golden Orange is not set in a slum or a ghetto, however, but in one of the wealthiest communities in America.

Life here is very different from English middle-class life portrayed in his work of nonfiction The Blooding (1989), but it seems just as authentic.

Unlike Wambaugh's earlier books, The Golden Orange deals with the difficulties inherent in every person's life, not just those of police officers. In Wambaugh's late twentieth-century America, it is difficult just to...