So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and “quality of life” squads, from a writer whose “tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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 going to be disappointed. I know there are
readers out there who will embrace Lush Life for its powerhouse writing
and insider's vision, but I suspect there are just as many who will be left as
unmoved and confused as I was by the heaps of praise laid at its doorstep. (Reviewed by Lucia Silva).
USA Today - Carol Memmott
Price, who was raised in the Bronx, gives his characters the walk and the talk of the city streets. The ultimate literary realist, Price tells a story that, as neatly as a black-and-white photo, shows all the shades of gray in our urban landscapes.
The Boston Globe - Maud Newton
From "The Wanderers," through "Clockers" and "Samaritan," Price's fiction has partaken of a dark, dry humor that emerges mostly in the characters' conversations, but "Lush Life" is his funniest book yet, more overtly comedic than any that precede it. If the novel has a failing, it's that Price doesn't dig down quite as relentlessly into the tar pits of his characters' motivations as he's generally done in the past.
Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese
Price moves deftly among his characters, and it is never clear who stands at the emotional center of the story .... In fact, this big, powerful novel belongs to all of them, and, like The Wire, its real protagonist is the complicated, tragic, and endlessly fascinating American city street. "A".
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With its perfect dialogue and attention to the smallest detail, Price's latest reminds readers why he's one of the masters of American urban crime fiction.
Library Journal
Starred Review. Price is an exceptionally accomplished storyteller ...and though what Price narrates often disturbs, it is just as often funny...Price's New York is a city that no longer works: too many people are left bruised, with no safety net.
Kirkus Reviews
There oughta be a law requiring Richard Price to publish more frequently. Because nobody does it better. Really. No time, no way.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
He depicts his characters' daily lives with such energy, such nuance and such keen psychological radar that he makes it all come alive to the reader—a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prose movie of a novel.
From the author of Bangkok 8, a head-spinning new novel that puts us back in the company of the inimitable Royal Thai Police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep.
More than a decade ago, Harry Bosch worked on the case of Marie Gesto, a twenty-two-year-old who went missing but was never found. Now, with the Gesto file still on his desk, Bosch gets a call from the District Attorney: A serial killer has confessed. Did Harry miss a key clue? Or is something more going on here?
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