Books

No matter how many mayors and tourist bureaus tout how well they have cleaned up New York City, novelists still find much chaos and anguish on its mean streets.

Richard Price, acclaimed author of Clockers and a writer for the recently ended HBO program The Wire, offers a tangled vision of the gritty world of senseless killing with Lush Life. Suspenseful, realistic and cinematic, it hijacks the plot of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment and puts a driver well-versed in street lingo at the wheel.

As in Dostoevski's masterpiece, the crime is presented at the beginning. Astute readers will quickly recognize the killer's identity, yet as one false lead after another falls into the laps of the police, the focus shifts from who-did-it to how-will-it- be-discovered.

Here's the setup: Late one night in Manhattan, three restaurant workers are straggling home thoroughly wasted. Two of them are new to the city and imagine their names in lights before long, while the third, Eric Cash, is 35, cynical and desperate to find a way out. A young couple walks by, arguing about the definition of the word "girlfriend."

A shot rings out. The young couple turns to see one of the three fall dead, while another runs away and the third passes out in fear. While being interviewed, the survivor who ran away, Cash, lies to the police, and the couple insist they saw him shoot the other companion and throw away his gun.

Add two gangsta kids into the mix and you have a recipe for senseless crime and dangerous misidentification.

Lush Life features an ensemble cast of New York City's street people, although Matty Clark, an Irish police detective in charge of the case, functions as the main character and moral center. He offers hard-bitten philosophical commentary and understanding: "Although a few pure athletes of evil did exist out there, most murderers, when he finally caught up to them, pretty much never met his expectations. For the most part, they were a stupid and fantastically self-centered lot; rarely did they come across, at least on first impression, as capable of the biblical enormity of what they had done."

Mr. Price is a master of dialogue and fast-action suspense. This is no doubt a realistic vision of the uneasy tension between kids from the projects and wannabe actors and writers with trust funds and cocaine habits, and it's told in bright, vivid language. It reads like an update of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. Yet at times the street lingo is so thick and street-cred pretentious it sounds like a Vanilla Ice press conference.

The title is ironic: It's the nickname of a private bar where Matty Clark moonlights as a security guard. The bar represents a vision of the Big Apple as an insiders' haunt, full of shadows and despair, ambition and violent happenstance.

William J. Cobb's latest novel, Goodnight, Texas, is now out in paperback.

Richard Price

(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $26)

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