Lush Life.

Price, Richard (author).

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Price (Samaritan, 2003) is a respected writer, but if he hasn’t won the literary acclaim he deserves, perhaps it’s because he focuses so often on crime. Although his plots make him worthy of the most discriminating crime-fiction fanship, as a writer of acute social conscience, he uses misdeeds as a lens through which to view the way people navigate ethical terrain in the precarious urban landscape. In outline, Lush Life is deceptively simple. On New York’s gentrifying Lower East Side, two boys from the projects hold up three men, killing one. Two cops investigate. But Price’s investigation is no mere police procedural, scouring away layers of self-defense in all of his vividly drawn characters. Such is his talent that we care about them all equally, whether they are the cops whose interrogation reduces an innocent man to emotional wreckage; the kid whose abuse leaves him unable to comprehend the value of human life; the narcissistic artists whose self-absorption renders them blind to the true desperation surrounding them. Stitching it together is the route driven by the Quality of Life Task Force, an undercover team that threatens pot smokers with hard time if they fail to produce a handgun. Given the plummeting crime rate in most major cities, it might be argued that crime-driven social dramas are no longer relevant. But making the streets safe for the café crowd has its hidden cost—and no one shows that better than Price.