Service With a Sneer: The Unrepentant Recollections of An Old-School Cop

Are you ready for a stroll down memory alley?

Can you recall a time when cops arrested rioters who were setting fire to buildings and vandalizing historical monuments? Remember when shoplifters actually went to jail? Imagine an era when violent lunatics weren't allowed to wander freely through neighborhoods and menace residents.

Don't you wish you lived in a time when the police were allowed to do their jobs?

Retired Southern California homicide detective John J. Lamb remembers those days because he was there.

Service With a Sneer is the first volume in his entertaining, sardonic, and unremorseful memoirs. The book takes the bold reader on a journey a half-century into the past. It's an era before computers, automated license plate readers, and body cams. It's a time when Tasers didn't exist and the only "less lethal" options open to police officers were nightsticks and fists. Yet those old-time cops did a pretty fair job keeping the streets safe.

The tale begins in the early 1960s. Lamb was a little boy with the deck stacked against him. He suffered from a crippling bone disease that forced him to wear a full metal leg brace, was so myopic he was legally blind, and was the victim of brutal and regular child abuse. Yet his improbable dream was to become a police officer.

He made that goal a reality. First, in 1974 when he joined the USAF Security Police and five years later when he became a deputy sheriff with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, working in the desert and tourist cities near Palm Springs.

Lamb's stories include:

How his work with British police detectives on a major and successful drug trafficking investigation led to his being targeted as a troublemaker by his USAF commanding officer.

How following shoe impressions in the desert sands led him to a pair of professional cat burglars who were pillaging homes in an exclusive community of millionaires.

His surprising observation while working a traffic security detail for then President-elect Ronald Reagan's motorcade.

Some readers might remember Lamb as the author of a series of "cozy" mystery novels set in the warm world of collectible teddy bears. Don't look for anything cute and cuddly in his newest book. Instead, he freely mixes tragedy with absurdity as he shares tales about vicious fights, high-speed fatal traffic crashes, the terrorist attack that wasn't, and how he convinced a woman that he had the know-how to evict Satan from her apartment.

The stories are shocking, infuriating, ironic, heart-rending, and sometimes gruesomely funny. Best of all, they're all true.