Night Watch

For more than a year, Jack Olsen embedded himself in the world of big-city police. He rode with them on their beats, visited them in their homes, walked with them into bars and back alleys and onto what he called “the killing grounds of this most dangerous of occupations.”

What he found became Night Watch.

Watch Commander Packer Lind is 37 years old, burly, dedicated, and trying to hold his precinct together. His officers are a ragtag collection of bruisers, smart-alecks, and troubled men living pressure-cooker lives that their families only dimly understand. Then a serial killer begins preying on the city. Then a second killer starts imitating the first one’s methods. And then someone begins sabotaging the department from within.

Is the threat coming from outside the precinct or from inside it?

Compared to Joseph Wambaugh for its brutal authenticity and uncanny ear for the language and psychology of cops, Night Watch is a gripping police procedural that is also something rarer: a genuinely compassionate portrait of the men who do this work and what it costs them.

“They are the most undervalued members of our society,” Olsen wrote after his year among them. “Good and decent men, for the most part, whose stresses and torments are only dimly understood by the public they serve. They live on the edge of a knife blade, and they pay the price in broken homes, tortured lives, and uncertain futures. The wonder isn’t that there are so many bad cops. The wonder is that there are so few.”
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