The first mystery encountered while reading Richard Price’s new crime novel, “The Whites” (Holt, 333 pp, $28), is why he chose the transparent pen name of Harry Brandt—“Richard Price Writing as Harry Brandt.”
He told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that he wanted to write something “slicker, tighter, faster, more the surface of what’s happening, more propelled by the mystery at its core [without] … any social resonance.” What Mr. Brandt has done, however, is write a Richard Price novel. One’s style, like one’s fingerprints, cannot be denied.
The book’s title is not a racial reference. It refers to the cases in which the “perpetrator”—or “actor,” as Mr. Price calls him—is known, but can’t be brought to justice. “The Whites” are the ones who got away, like Ahab’s great white whale.
The protagonist is Detective Sergeant Billy Graves, who heads up the Night Watch, the graveyard shift that covers all the crimes committed during the night throughout the city, until the individual precincts open in the morning. It is a kind of exile for Graves, who once shot a drugged-up perp and accidentally hit a child bystander when the bullet passed through the criminal’s body. He became the focus of media attention and his career went south.
Graves had been a member of a group of rookies who styled themselves “the Wild Geese.” They were an ambitious group who “were given a ticket to ride in one of the worst precincts in the East Bronx,” Mr. Price writes. “Preternaturally protective, sometimes showing up at the trouble spots two steps ahead of the actors … they were decathletes, chasing their prey through backyards and apartments, across roof tops, up and down fire escapes and into bodies of water … the Wild Geese in the eyes of all the people they protected and occasionally avenged, walked the streets like gods.”
All members of the Wild Geese rose quickly to the rank of detective, such was their crime-fighting success. Yet each of them has a “White,” Mr. Price writes, “who had committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice.” When the novel begins, each of the Wild Geese has gone on to other careers. One is a real estate tycoon, another is a funeral home director and yet another is a private security guard. Yet they remain in touch and periodically get together to remind themselves of their glorious past.
Graves’s life is relatively stable. He is married to his second wife, Carmen, an emergency room nurse, and they live on Staten Island with their two young boys and Graves’s father, a retired police captain who is suffering from dementia. But on St. Patrick’s Day, he is called to Penn Station. Someone has been murdered.
He discovers it is the White of one of his former partners, whose whereabouts during the murder established his innocence. Gradually, more and more of the Whites are being killed, and Graves’s search for the murderer, or murderers, fuels the narrative.
There is, however, a second plot. Another officer, Milton Ramos, psychopathic and remorseless, recognizes Carmen as a figure from his past, who was responsible for the death of his brother when she was a teenager. He is determined to make her suffer, and the threats against her and her family are ratcheted up. He frightens Carmen and Graves by making himself known to their children when they are waiting for a school bus. He abducts Graves’s father, who thinks he’s being picked up by his driver to go on patrol. And the action finally culminates in an unforgettable scene in the family living room.
“The Whites” exhales the odor of the squad room and has the gritty street-wise realism for which Mr. Price is so well known. He has an enviable gift with language—Graves’s eyes have “a crushed cellophane look” and another character “is nearly big enough to have his own zip code.”
“The Whites” is a novel of obsession and an inconclusive meditation on morality. Early in the book, the father of a White’s victim says, “Our pastor says Jesus wants us to try and forgive, but I’ll tell you, these last few years? I’m all about the God of the Jews.”
Mr. Price’s world is not limned in black and white, but in varying shades of gray. Nevertheless, it is a rattling good story. Once you pick it up, you won’t be able to put it down.
on Sep 28, 2015