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The Whites

Review

The Whites

THE WHITES, written by Richard Price using the pseudonym "Harry Brandt," is a gritty police procedural that takes place in the 1990s. The title refers to the cases that get away and are never solved or the perps are never taken into custody. These haunt the cops like ghosts. A small group of five new recruits band together and call themselves the Wild Geese, or the Whites. Among these young men is the protagonist, Detective Billy Graves.

Billy’s career has not gone as he had planned. He got into a gunfight with a drug addict and accidentally shot a 10-year-old boy. He, too, was accused of being high at the time, and that marked him in the press. He earned the title of a rogue and ended up working every dead-end shift, which he survived and got him to where he is now: a detective in Manhattan Night Watch. This small team is tasked with policing the borough from Harlem to Wall Street.

"This plot-driven, fast-moving procedural is one not to miss. Price is on his mark as the narrative unfolds. The tightly drawn characters are limned so that you expect them to jump off the page."

One night, a brutal crime is committed on a subway platform. It is too "hot" to hand off to the day squad because Billy knows the murdered man from the old days of the Wild Geese crew. Too soon, another White goes down and then another. But while Billy is investigating these murders, he doesn't realize that one of the Wild Geese members who remains is after him and his whole family. The guy is a psychopath with a gun and a badge, with his "real" target being Carmen Graves, Billy's wife. He holds Carmen, a nurse in a busy Manhattan hospital, responsible for the deaths of his mother and two brothers.

Billy is no angel, though. He is responsible for helping a young female journalist on her biggest story get it wrong. She loses her job and can't get another one. All of this happened in good faith, but in THE WHITES, even good deeds often go punished.

This plot-driven, fast-moving procedural is one not to miss. Price is on his mark as the narrative unfolds. The tightly drawn characters are limned so that you expect them to jump off the page. The "cop speak" is on target and brings readers into the action. In an interview with Dan Piepenbring from The Paris Review in 1996, he said of being a writer, "When you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you become an author…the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.”

Richard Price has written a number of books, including LUSH LIFE and CLOCKERS, and wrote several episodes of the HBO series “The Wire.” He is a respected author in that persona, but the question is: Will he turn his hand to bringing back Harry Brandt? Let's hope the answer is "Yes!"

Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum on February 20, 2015

The Whites
by Richard Price

  • Publication Date: February 9, 2016
  • Genres: Fiction, Mystery
  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Picador
  • ISBN-10: 0312621302
  • ISBN-13: 9780312621308