From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Synopses & Reviews
The electrifying debut of a new master of American crime fiction, Harry Brandt — the pen name of novelist 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.
Review
"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
Review
"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. I began being fascinated, and ended being deeply moved. Call him Price or Brandt, he knows everything about police life, and plenty about friendship: what your friends do for you…and what they sometimes do to you." Stephen King
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....The author skillfully manipulates [his] multiple story lines for peak suspense, as his arresting characters careen toward a devastating final reckoning." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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. He does it all with indelible phrasing that captures both the black humor of the on-the-job cop and the give-and-take of longtime married couples. While the finely tuned story engine accelerates, it's supercharged with complications...In the end, The Whites isn't about cops and killers so much as it is about the damage we all carry [and] the sins we've all committed." Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Fasten your seat belt.... Old tragedies combine with fresh ones in Brandt's steely-jawed, carefully constructed procedural. Few crime novelists are as good at taut storytelling as Richard Price.... 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 Reviews
About the Author
Harry Brandt is the pen name of acclaimed novelist Richard Price, whose eight previous novels —i ncluding Clockers and Lush Life — have won universal praise for their vividly etched portrayals of urban America. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams.