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."
Jack Olsen is the author of thirty-three books, published in fifteen countries. Olsen’s journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Scripps-Howard Award as well as other honors. Olsen was described as “the dean of true crime authors” by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and “the master of true crime” by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him “the best true crime writer around.” His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses. In a page-one review, the New York Times described his work as “a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike.” Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writer’s of America, Edgar award.