A review by stephen_coulon
Lush Life by Richard Price

3.0

A shrewd and gritty police procedural written by Richard Price set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When a transplanted actor/restaurant worker is murdered in a botched mugging, the police struggle to grind out the event’s details through the ragbag diversity of a half-gentrified Manhattan neighborhood. The narrative focuses on the frustrating realities of police work in a community of disparate urban tribes that each follow their own cultural norms in regard to criminality and citizenry. As a police procedural attention is paid toward realism in the portrayal of detective work, from bureaucratic top-office politics to tedious street-level canvassing for witnesses, so the story gets bogged down sometimes in its own zeal for credibility. Likewise, the expanded cast of characters leaves little room for depth of development, yet that may be beside the point. Price’s real strength resides in his masterful use of descriptive metaphor and his authentic understanding of slang and colloquialisms. While reading, I kept thinking of the greatest police procedural television show of all time, The Wire (2002-2008), and after finishing the book found out that Price was one of the writers for that show, so reader’s advisory: if you like The Wire you’ll like Richard Price’s fiction.