Joseph Wambaugh returns to glamorous Palm Springs and its ever-mysterious desert to give us a suspense novel that uses that glamour and that awesome desert in equal measure. The fugitive is indeed a strange man. All that is known of him is that he speaks with an accent, is bald, is carrying a flight bag, and is adept at covering his tracks. He is seen first at a small airport in the desert, where his private plane makes an unscheduled landing. When a police officer barges in on him in the men's room, the fugitive quickly shows his willingness to be violent. And when he escapes from that encounter, he demonstrates that he is a man of the desert, wise in the ways of survival. Who he is and what his mission is become increasingly baffling to the police. But it will be three mismatched people - only one of whom is actually on a police force - who will become involved in the trail of the elusive and dangerous man. Breda Burrows is a brash, good-looking, tough-talking ex-police officer determined to make her way as a private investigator in the exclusive world of Palm Springs. She enlists the aid of an about-to-be-ex-policeman, Lynn Cutter, world-class cynic and equally accomplished boozer who has been sweating out a disability pension. Now he has the strangest of sperm-bank cases to solve for Breda - and Breda's chocolate-brown freckle to mesmerize him. The search for the solution to their own case leads Breda and Lynn onto a collision course with a loose cannon named Nelson Hareem, familiarly known as Dirty Hareem, an awesomely overeager young policeman stuck in a sweltering desert post and dreaming of the shade and glamour of a job with the Palm Springs force. He is convinced that catching the fugitive will be his personal salvation. The trail of the fugitive will lead them from remote desert canyons to the golden boulevards of Palm Springs, from funeral parlors to swank hotels to celebrity golf tornaments. from endless stakeouts to high-speed chases. All of Joseph Wambaugh's special talents as a master storyteller are on display in Fugitive Nights: the wild humour of his barroom scenes with their memorable inhabitants, the awesome beauty and menace of his desert setting, the glamour and glitter of Palm Springs, the depth and variety of his characterizations, the brilliance of his plotting. The result is one of his most skilful, baffling, entertaining and suspenseful novels ever.

Thriller