Whites (Price) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[R]iveting…. [Price] not only has a visceral ability to convey the gritty, day-to-day realities of [his characters'] jobs, but also a knack for using their detective work the way John le Carre has used spy stories and tradecraft, as a framework on which to build complex investigations into the human soul…. No one has a better ear for street language than [Price] does, and no one these days writes with more kinetic energy or more hard-boiled verve. His high-impact prose is the perfect tool for excavating the grisly horrors of urban life…And his ability to map his characters' inner lives—all the dreams and memories and wounds that make them tick—results in people who become as vivid to us as real-life relatives or friends…. [The Whites] is, at once, a gripping police procedural and an affecting study in character and fate.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


[A]s much an entertaining story as it is an examination of the job of policing…. The novel posits a simple axiom: Those who go into darkness as a matter of course and duty bring some measure of darkness back into themselves. How to keep it from spreading like a cancer, eating at your humanity, is the police officer's eternal struggle. It's this struggle that [Price] places at the heart of his storytelling. Another great so-called crime novelist, Joseph Wambaugh, has said that the best crime novels aren't about how cops work cases, they're about how cases work cops. This holds true, with fervor, in The Whites…. The routine of police procedure…is just right, depicted in its perfect shopworn way. And the dialogue…reaches the high-water mark of previous Richard Price novels…. The Whites is a work of reportage as much as it is a work of fiction…. It tells it like it is. It provides insight and knowledge, both rare qualities in the killing fields of the crime novel. It's a book that makes you feel that Price has circled the murders at this detective's side and in the process really gotten to know a city.
Michael Connelly - New York Times Book Review


A maze of a novel that alternates between scenes of intense introspection and scenes driven by dialogue…. It is not, finally, a novel of clearly delineated solutions but a novel of conscience, fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Joyce Carol Oates - The New Yorker


Seven years is too long for New Yorkers to wait for the next book from Richard Price but he’s finally here again with a stunning NYPD novel….The Whites is grippingly immersive, its characters and the world they move through, indelible.
New York Daily News


(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… 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.) 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....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


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