Service With a Sneer

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Are you ready for a stroll down memory alley?</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Don't you wish you lived in a time when the police were allowed to do their jobs?</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Retired Southern California homicide detective John J. Lamb remembers those days because he was there.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Lamb's stories include:</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>His surprising observation while working a traffic security detail for then President-elect Ronald Reagan's motorcade.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The stories are shocking infuriating ironic heart-rending and sometimes gruesomely funny. Best of all they're all true.</span></p>