The Whites

I'm not sure of all the artistic and/or contractual reasons why Richard Price wrote his latest novel under (or, rather, as the cover has it, over) a pen name, but any Price fan will be glad to hear that, even when he's trying to write a quick, commercial crime thriller, he can't help but write a full-on Richard Price novel. Crime thriller it certainly is, but one packed full of the best Price qualities: complex characters on all sides of the law (in this case, cops, crossing the line every which way to Sunday), sharply observed details of the microcultures of New York City, and, of course, his deliciously spot-on dialogue. The Whites (as in white whales, those killers who got away with it who haunt a cop's career), makes a chaotic, fictional, tragic East Coast complement to Jill Leovy's Ghettoside.