Joseph Wambaugh, who wrote the gripping, true-crime bestseller "The Onion Field" and numerous gritty but darkly humorous novels about day-to-day police work drawn from his own experiences as a Los Angeles police officer, has died at 88.
A family friend, Janene Gant, told The New York Times that Wambaugh died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, and the cause was esophageal cancer.
