In Hollywood, even the cops have a shtick
Hollywood Station
By Joseph Wambaugh
Little, Brown, 340 pp., $24.99
Gravewriter
By Mark Arsenault
St. Martin’s, 288 pp., $23.95
The Body in the Ivy
By Katherine Hall Page
Morrow, 256 pp., $23.95
In Joseph Wambugh's "Hollywood Station," the mantra "Stay real" couldn't be more appropriate for cops whose beat includes Grauman's Chinese Theatre. There, throngs of tourists rub shoulders with Elvis, Elmo, and Batman impersonators along with panhandlers, thieves, and tweakers (methamphetamine addicts). Old movie posters adorn the stationhouse walls, and officers compete for the BHI (Bizarre Hollywood Incident) prize.
Slice-of-life vignettes introduce the reader to a colorful cast of cops. Meet aging surfer dudes Flotsam and Jetsam; jaded Fausto Gamboa, who finds his softer, avuncular side when he partners with new mother Budgie Polk; Hollywood Nate, who moonlights security for film crews and dreams of getting his Screen Actors Guild card; and the meticulous and insightful Ukrainian-born Viktor Chernenko, who skewers his idioms (" Keep the eyes skinned," he says, urging a colleague to continue looking for a suspect). Presiding with calm wisdom and a taste for Mexican food is
Episodic storytelling coalesces around a pair of tweakers, Farley Ramsdale and his girlfriend Olive (think Steve Buscemi and Shelley Duvall ), who go fishing in a mailbox and come up with a letter announcing a diamond delivery. They sell the letter to Cosmo Betrossian and his brassy girlfriend Ilya (think Boris and Natasha), who use the information to pull off a daring heist.
This is Wambaugh's 17th book, and he improves on the formula he invented 35 years ago in "The New Centurions," writing an insider's view of the Los Angeles Police Department. One part "Fargo," one part "Hill Street Blues," the novel is alternately astonishing, wildly funny, poignant, and horrifying; it's hands down the best crime fiction I've read this year.
For an insider's view of the newsroom, there's Mark Arsenault's "Gravewriter." Billy Povich is a loser, a former star investigative reporter who works the graveyard shift writing obituaries and makes a few bucks on the side, ghostwriting horoscopes for Madam Vroom. He lives with his young son and irascible father in a scruffy apartment over a funeral home on Providence's unfashionable West Side. Way over his head in gambling debt, his credit cards maxed out, he has to bob and weave to avoid toughs waiting around every corner to collect. Billy barely notices his son, Bo, a sweet soul who wanders about at night wearing his Batman suit, checking that the people he loves are still breathing.
One night, Billy works the late shift. "The obituary department's fax machine ground out the dead all night long," he observes. When a funeral home faxes over a pathetically brief obituary for a 78-year-old woman, Billy calls her church, demanding to know more. He bullies the rector: "She's going to look like a . . . loser who never did anything with her life." He's really talking about himself.
Since his ex-wife's death in a car crash, Billy has been stuck in the past, fantasizing about murdering the man who is responsible for her death. But before he can act, he's called for jury duty. The case involves a convict accused of murdering a fellow prison escapee. A reporter at heart, Billy can't stop himself from investigating, and soon discovers a related murder and more than a little reasonable doubt.
This novel aspires to be a thriller, and it has all the requisite adrenaline-pumping chases, heists, and murders, strung together with jump cuts. In fact, it's that rare bird, a suspense novel with a heart.
For more of a trip to fantasy island, Katherine Hall Page's 16th Faith Fairchild mystery, "The Body in the Ivy," is a traditional cozy built around an homage to the Agatha Christie classic "And Then There Were None."
The familiar plot involves 10 characters, marooned at a posh estate on an island. In this updated version, former Pelham College (a fictional stand-in for Wellesley, Page's alma mater?) classmates are lured on various pretenses to what turns out to be a reunion. Their hostess is Barbara Bailey Bishop, a reclusive bestselling author. In college, they knew Barbara as Elaine Prince, the twin sister of Helene "Prin" Prince, a vivacious, nasty piece of work who died in a fall from a campus tower, a supposed suicide. Once a shrinking violet, Barbara has not only changed her name and become fabulously successful, she's transformed herself into the spitting image of her dead sister. It's soon revealed that she's staged the reunion as a ploy to discover which of her sister's "friends" killed her.
Caterer and part-time sleuth Faith is offered a lucrative contract to provide the food for what she expects will be an uneventful weekend, but she gets more than cucumber sandwiches to serve up. In Christie tradition, a storm blows in, power fails, communications are cut off, and bodies begin to drop.
This is an intricately plotted novel that challenges readers to keep a large cast of characters straight. Each guest's motive for murder is revealed in flashbacks to events at the college, decades earlier. I enjoyed the interpersonal dynamics among the grown women, rendered with nicely bitchy undertones and seasoned with just a touch of vinegar.
Hallie Ephron is the author of "Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock 'Em Dead With Style," nominated for Edgar and Anthony awards. Contact her through www.hallieephron.com. 
