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by Harry Brandt (Richard Price)
Back in the run-and-gun days of the mid-90s, when Billy Graves worked in the South Bronx as part of an anti-crime unit known as the Wild Geese, he made headlines by accidentally shooting a 10-year-old boy while stopping an angel-dusted berserker in the street. Branded as a cowboy by his higher-ups, for the next eighteen years Billy endured one dead-end posting after another. Now in his early forties, he has somehow survived and become a sergeant in Manhattan Night Watch, a small team of detectives charged with responding to all night-time felonies from Wall Street to Harlem.
Night Watch usually acts a set-up crew for the day shift, but when Billy is called to a 4:00 a.m. fatal slashing of a man in Penn Station, his investigation of the crime moves beyond the usual handoff. And when he discovers that the victim was once a suspect in the unsolved murder of a 12-year-old boy - a brutal case with connections to the former members of the Wild Geese - the bad old days are back in Billy's life with a vengeance, tearing apart enduring friendships forged in the urban trenches and even threatening the safety of his family.
Richard Price, one of America's most gifted novelists, has always written brilliantly about cops, criminals, and New York City. Now, writing as Harry Brandt, he is poised to win a huge following among all those who hunger for first-rate crime fiction.
"Starred Review. A gripping, gritty, Greek tragedy of cops, killers, and the sometimes-blurry line between them… Price is one whale of a storyteller by any name." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. This is going to be a strong contender for best crime novel of 2015… With one-of-a-kind characters and settings so real you can smell them, Brandt plunges us into the chaos of domestic life, the true agony of a parent's grief, the cost of secrets kept and revealed." - Booklist
"Fasten your seat belt…In the wake of rage and sorrow, ordinary people respond by going crazy and screwing up. In this far-from-ordinary novel, Price/Brandt explores the hows and whys." - Kirkus
"The Whites is the crime novel of the year - grim, gutsy, and impossible to put down. I had to read the final 100 pages in a single sitting." - Stephen King
"This is high-octane literature, with the best of Richard Price and his souped-up pseudonym Harry Brandt. Price/Brandt gets to the heart of those stories that everyone else refuses to tell." - Colum McCann
"Whether you call it a crime novel or a mystery novel or a giraffe with polka dots is largely irrelevant - The Whites is, simply put, a great American novel." - Dennis Lehane
"Richard Price isn't fooling anybody with this Harry Brandt business; only he could have written The Whites. It has everything that makes his novels so wonderful - the dark humor, the intricate interleaving of character and plot, the deep research into the science of the streets, the moral gravity and the flawless, magical dialogue." - Michael Chabon
This information about The Whites was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Ralph Gibson (2002)
Richard Price, born in the Bronx, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia. He also did graduate work at Stanford. He has taught writing at Columbia, Yale, and New York University.
Price is the author of nine novels, most recently The Whites, originally published under the pseudonym Harry Brandt. His other novels include Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. In 1999 he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 he won an Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire. His miniseries The Night Of was premiered on HBO in July 2016.
His fiction, articles and essays have appeared in Best American Essays 2002, The New York Times, The New York Times Book...
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