Lines and Shadows by Joseph WambaughAbstractLines and Shadows, by Joseph Wambaugh, tells the story of a group of regular San Diego street cops assigned to a task force designed to stop victimization of illegal alien people by bandits in a hellish no-man's land near the Mexico-US border. The officers quickly realize that the problem may be too big for ordinary street cops like them, and many must deal with the psychological, emotional, and social conflicts caused and manifested by the events that occur during their mission. Lines and Shadows, by Joseph Wambaugh, tells two stories at once. One takes place on an imaginary line between two very different economies. The other takes place on the imaginary line between sanity and madness. Both of these imaginary lines are crossed following the San Diego Police Department's dispatch of a task force of young officers, most of whom are Mexican-Americans, into a no-man's land south of San Diego known as "Deadman's Canyon", located near the Mexican border. Their function and purpose, they are told, is to arrest bandits who victimize illegal Mexican immigrants crossing the border into America. The main theme of the book can be realized in the epilogue when it states "they did it the only way they knew how - not ingeniously, simply instinctively, trying to resurrect at the end of the twentieth century a mythical hero who never was... the Gunslinger." (Wambaugh, 1984, p. 382)" The message the author attempted to convey is, simply put, that police were never meant to be action heroes. In my opinion, he is telling a story of that What happens when law enforcement gets too caught up in the "crime-fighting role" of the police, Wambaugh conveys this by revealing what happens to each of the task force members the more they get out into those canyons..