Widespread Panic tells a story taken from a chapter in the life of Freddy Otash, a former Marine and L.A. vice cop later dismissed from the force in the early 1950s under somewhat murky circumstances who goes on to find a niche for himself as a private investigator, a strong arm for a scurrilous celebrity magazine that dishes all the dirt on the private lives of movie stars, and a planter of bugs in the homes of persons of interest to the LAPD (and its infamous chief, William H. Parker), state and federal law enforcement agencies.

In the beginning of the novel, Otash is introduced to the reader as someone who lived a shady, dissolute life, having died in the summer of 1992 in his early 70s. He has been consigned to purgatory and it is from that perch that he shares with the reader his experiences of living in the L.A. of the 1950s with views of the shady side of Hollywood and life in the city's underbelly.

While Widespread Panic was an entertaining novel, it is not one that I am likely to re-read. Its feel was like bubble gum, which at first fresh and tasty, grows stale the longer you chew it.