When Richard Price offers up a new novel, it is usually a chunky tome that revolves around the streets and the people who literally make them. Set in Harlem, LAZARUS MAN is another look at the community in which he is most interested (and where he has lived since the year the book takes place).

In 2008, the collapse of a five-story building impacts a Harlem neighborhood much like 9/11 reshaped entire cities. The people are torn apart, grieving those who have lost their homes and their lives. Price takes four main characters and intertwines their lives with the aftermath of this unnatural disaster. Each has a stake in the community and a truly difficult transition after the building goes down.

"The miracle of this book is how these survivors find their own ways to continue to move forward and love a place that may not love them back."

Anthony Carter handles his miraculous survival with a new lease on life, one that involves a mission statement like no other (he is the “Lazarus Man” of the title). Felix Pearl is a new city dweller whose work in photography and film on that exact day helps him determine how his talents will shape his destiny. Royal Davis, the owner of a failing funeral home who goes looking for clients among the ruins of the fire, finds that he is no longer interested in the death biz and needs a way out into another life. Then there is Mary Roe, a detective with a horrific past who discovers that finding survivors in the wreck is starting to become an obsession.

They are all everyday folks who are part of a community like any other. However, with his investigative skills, Price takes a tragedy and turns it into the most intensive social experiment possible --- similar to how he weaved intensity into CLOCKERS and in the stories he wrote for “The Wire.”

Price doesn’t play around. His work is tight, specific and journalistic in the details. He is sympathetic to his characters, knowing they are fully dimensional beings who are part hero and part clown, part selfish bastard and part generous caretaker. Their private histories cannot help but affect the ways in which they handle the forthcoming repercussions of the fire. Their needs and hopes are equal parts possible and dashed as the investigation goes on, and each character becomes obsessed with people, places and things with which they were never engaged before this tragedy occurred.

After 9/11, myriad mass shootings, natural disasters that continue to increase in unexpected ways, the pandemic, lockdown and our irregular political times, LAZARUS MAN tries to shine a light on the changes and the pain that events of this magnitude bestow on every person in that path. The miracle of this book is how these survivors find their own ways to continue to move forward and love a place that may not love them back.