Review
Lush Life reads like a giant, sprawling episode of
your favorite fast-talking police procedural, with type breaks and metaphors
standing in for jump cuts and sweeping crane-mounted pans across the city
skyline. Much more in line with
The Wire (for which Richard Price wrote
several episodes) than
Law and Order, Price is obviously concerned with
deeper ideas about the nature of the city, gentrification, and the
intersections of race and class, and
Lush Life both succeeds and suffers
for it. Many readers will come to this novel wanting Price to walk a fine line,
hoping to find either a masterful work of crime fiction that transcends the
genre or a finely crafted novel shot through with a thrilling dose of crime
drama. Despite all the rave reviews in major publications, I can't help thinking
that readers from both camps are...
