The stunning debut of a spectacularly talented crime novelist—who also writes under the name Richard PriceBack in the bad old days, when Billy Graves worked for an anti-crime unit in Harlem known as the Wild Geese, the NYPD branded him as a cowboy. Now forty, he has somehow survived and become a sergeant in Manhattan Night Watch. Mostly, his team of detectives conducts a series of holding actions—and after years in police purgatory, Billy is content simply to do his job.But soon after he gets a 3:00 a.m. call about the fatal knifing of a drunk in a Third Avenue pub, his investigation moves beyond the usual handoff to the day shift. And when he discovers that the victim was once a suspect in the unsolved murder of a 13-year-old girl, he finds himself drawn back to the late 1990s when the Wild Geese were at their most wayward. Before the case can be closed, it will severely test Billy's new sense of purpose and force him to accept that his troubled...

The Wanderers, a teen-age gang in the Bronx of the early Sixties, are just trying to stay alive--and maybe have a little sex. But it's not going to be easy. They're facing murderous parents, unimpressed girls, and all-Chinese gang and a pack of mute Irish maniacs, apathetic teachers, and a ten-year-old cold-blooded killer. Will The Wanderers be alive a week from now? Will the girls come across? This is fantastically powerful and funny fiction--psychological realism to a doo-wop beat."A deeply moving account of confused and spiritually underprivileged youth."-- William S. Burroughs"I haven't read a better fictional account of the dark side of the American dream in years."-- John FowlesWritten when the author was twenty-four, this story was the basis for a major feature film.

In 1998, Richard Price returned to the gritty urban landscape of his national bestseller Clockers to produce Freedomland, a searing and unforgettable novel about a hijacked car, a missing child, and an embattled neighborhood polarized by racism, distrust, and accusation.  Freedomland hit bestseller lists from coast to coast, including those of the Boston Globe, USA Today and Los Angeles Times; garnered universally rave reviews; and was selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the Imus American Book Award and as a New York Times Notable Book.  On May 11, this highly lauded bestseller is available in paperback for the first time. A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night.So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.From the Paperback edition.Amazon.com ReviewIn Freedomland, Richard Price returns to the gritty terrain he first explored in Clockers. This time, the fictional (but all too convincing) urban eyesore of Dempsy, New Jersey, is convulsed by a high-profile carjacking. A single mom named Brenda Martin insists that a man stopped her car, yanked her from behind the wheel, and drove off with the vehicle--and her young son. Behind these horrific facts looms another: the victim is white and the perpetrator is black. Immediately the racial calculus of American life comes to bear on the crime, which becomes a focus for long-smoldering animosities. As a three-ring circus of media, cops, and gawkers converges on the crime scene, Dempsy and the adjoining white community of Gannon seem primed for an explosion. Price passes the narrative baton back and forth between Lorenzo Council, an ambitious black detective, and Jesse Haus, a no-less-ambitious reporter for the local paper. Lorenzo's street-smart, agitated voice is the more convincing of the two. Jesse, with her frantic compulsion to squeeze local color from the crisis, never quite attains three dimensions--although her outsider's relationship to her material suggests some faint, fascinating echo of the author's. In any case, Price allows the story to proceed at an irresistible slow burn. His ear for dialogue is as sharp as ever, and nobody casts a colder or more accurate eye on our fin-de-siècle urban existence. From Publishers WeeklySet in the same blasted New Jersey ghetto as his much-admired Clockers (1992), Price's first novel since that bestseller is less a sequel than a monumental complement played in minor key, a re-visitation by an author who's older, sadder, wiser. The story flows from an event drawn from headlines: Brenda Martin, a white woman, staggers bleeding into a hospital to claim that her car has been hijacked by a black man?with her four-year-old son in the backseat. The jacking allegedly occurred in the park that divides the largely black city of Dempsey from the white-dominated city of Gannon. In response, Gannon cops seal off and invade D-Town, inflaming racial tensions and attracting an army of media. As in Clockers, Price again scans urban life through two protagonists, one black, one white?here, black Dempsey cop Lorenzo Council and white local reporter Jesse Haus. As both draw close to grief-crazed Brenda, one question propels the narrative: Is she telling the truth? The answer and its violent aftermath are equally inevitable, as Price snares the surface and the substance of America caught in a slow-motion riot of racial rage. His language is street-fresh, his dialogue as if eavesdropped; his characters are soulful, flawed, dead real. Price's experience as a screenwriter (The Color of Money, etc.) shows in the predictable dramatic arc of his tale, but the novel is no less powerful for its popular bent. Within its structural confines, the story line veers in unexpected directions, with each detour bringing readers closer to Price's ultimate vision?that our nation's hope lies not in social movements but in the flame of humaneness that flickers in each of us, cop and criminal, black and white. 125,000 first printing; $175,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB alternates; first serial to the New Yorker; film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount for $2 million; simultaneous BDD audio; author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Novelist and Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Richard Price's bestselling second novel offers "an unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair" (USA Today) At once an intense mystery and a revealing study of two men, a veteran homicide detective and an innercity crack dealer, on opposite sides of an endless war. Clockers is "powerful . . . harrowing . . . remarkable" (The New York Times Book Review). Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He wrote the screenplays for the films Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best TV writing as a co-writer for the HBO series The Wire. A member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in New York City. Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle AwardVeteran homicide detective Rocco Klein's passion for the job gave way long ago. His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together. Then, Victor Dunham—a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record—confesses to a shooting outside a local fast-food joint. It doesn't take long for Rocco's attention to turn to Victor's brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime. At once a mystery and a revealing study of two men related by blood but on opposite sides of an unwinnable war, Clockers is a well-rendered portrait of modern life on the streets of inner-city America. "The skeleton of Richard Price's bold and powerful new novel, Clockers, is a seemingly straightforward murder mystery . . . Mr. Price works enough in the way of muscle, flesh and integument to achieve a drama of quite remarkable complexity. It's clear that he has taken the dramatic skills he honed as a screenwriter and combined them with the manically energetic prose and strong sense of working-class milieu that were evident in his four previous talented novels . . . He trusts the strength of his plot . . . He narrates Clockers in a street idiom that takes a little getting used to but soon projects us forcefully into the minds of the characters . . . He makes an elaborate point of showing how the appetites of the underclass reflect the American Dream. As Strike flips through a collection of mail-order catalogues, the narrator comments: 'Strike had no real love of things for themselves, but he loved the idea of things, the concept of possession' . . . The signal achievement of Clockers is to make us feel the enormous power of these giants that are drugs, alcoholism, poverty. But of tragically equal weight in this harrowing story is the passion even in the lowest of street hustlers to do battle with these giants to the point of defeat and death."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times"For almost a full 600 pages, Richard Price's Clockers hustles us through more than we thought we ever wanted to know about two of the least genteel occupations in our disintegrating inner cities—drug dealing and homicide investigation. And here's the good news: it's worth it . . . Mr. Price handles the dialogue of both worlds beautifully . . . But perhaps the novel's most impressive accomplishment is the sheer amount of exposition it deploys and controls without ever losing its narrative drive. To read Clockers is to become privy to truckloads of what seems to be authoritatively inside information—years of research apparently paying off . . . Clockers manages to come across as both clear-eyed and bighearted, able to illuminate and celebrate, in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances imaginable, a cop's heroism and a small-time drug dealer's stubborn resilience, without overly sentimentalizing either."—Jim Shepard, The New York Times Book Review"One hell of a book."—Washington Post Book World"Page after page explodes with a prose as vivid as kinetic art."—Chicago Tribune"Price displays a near-perfect ear for street language . . . He gets so deep under the skin of both the cops and the clockers that it's hard to believe he himself has never been either."—People magazine"An unforgettable picture of inner-city decay and despair."—USA Today"A huge, ambitious novel about cops, kids, and cocaine . . . Price pressure-cooks the city down to its dense, searing essentials."—The Village Voice"Any middle-aged white writer who attempts the point of view of a black teenager for more than a few pages risks being accused of minstrelsy or, worse, patronizing cluelessness, but the guilt-stricken, ulcer-ridden Strike is such a fully realized creation that spending half the book in his head becomes a pleasure. All this is the product of years of research on Price’s part, both with the real clockers of the Jersey City projects and the homicide detectives who allowed him to ride along (the latter practice is quite common among crime writers, the former considerably less so). Any writer, though, can do research and come up with nothing but details and jargon; Clockers feels lived through in a way few crime novels ever do."—Scott Phillips, the author of The Ice Harvest, The Walkaway and Cottonwood"Price has spent the past ten years writing for Hollywood—but you wouldn't know it from the dense textures and supple dramatics of this epic slice of urban grit about frazzled drug-dealers and burnt-out cops. Of the many impeccably authentic urban types here, Price focuses on two: 20-ish 'Strike' Dunham, black chief of a crew of crack-dealers ('clockers') in the dead-end burg of Dempsy, N.J., and 43-year-old white Dempsy homicide cop Rocco Klein. Each is suffering an identity crisis when a murder puts them on a collision course. Strike, in a constant panic from dealing with his homicidal boss, crack-kingpin Rodney Little, is considering changing jobs; Rocco, six months from retirement, is thinking that his life is a big zero—a nullity underlined by his humiliating antics to curry the favor of a film star who might portray him in a movie. Then someone guns down another of Little's henchmen, and—shocking both Strike and Rocco—Strike's solid-citizen older brother, Victor, confesses to the killing: 'self-defense,' he claims. Not so, thinks Rocco, who decides that Victor is covering for Strike and starts harassing the young dealer by framing him as a stoolie—certain death at Little's hands. Meanwhile, myriad subplots vivify Strike's and Rocco's worlds: Rocco initiates the film star into the horrors of jail-life; Strike apprentices a young boy into dealing; Rocco's baby girl disappears; Little's legendary hit man wastes away from AIDS; Strike nearly dies from a bleeding ulcer. Finally, Strike, with a vengeful Little literally steps behind, turns to Rocco for help—a move that allows both to find a kind of hope and renewal. A vital and bold novel rich in unexpected pleasure, with Price generally avoiding melodrama, sentimentality, and stereotype to portray a harsh world with cleareyed compassion."—Kirkus Reviews"Selling $10 bottles of cocaine to drive-by customers, clockers are at the low end of the drug-dealing chain. One step up is Strike Dunham, an ulcer-ridden, black 19-year-old who oversees his part of the operation from a bench in the housing projects of a New Jersey city called Dempsy—the bleak and confined world that screenwriter and novelist Price explores with consistent authority. The murder of another dealer in Strike's drug organization brings in middle-aged, almost burned-out homicide detective Rocco Klein, who doesn't believe it when Strike's brother Victor, a young man with a family, two jobs and a clean record, confesses to the crime. The shooter's identity and motive are the questions on which Price turns this thoroughgoing exploration of Dempsy's dark and gritty underside, a place marked by unceasing, often random, motion and by the steady closing in of horizons. At the same time, Price plumbs the remarkably parallel interior worlds of Rocco and Strike. Although neither the hard-drinking Rocco, with a wife and infant daughter, nor the solitary Strike, who downs bottle after bottle of vanilla Yoo-Hoo to soothe his stomach pain, has a drug habit, each is as addicted—Strike to power and status, Rocco to the unpredictability and risk of his job—as are the junkies both pursue. The vividly depicted Dempsy seems a Dantean hell, at once a place and a condition from which escape may be impossible."—Publishers Weekly

The electrifying tale of a New York City police detective under siege—by an unsolved murder, by his own dark past, and by a violent stalker seeking revenge.Back in the run-and-gun days of the mid-1990s, when a young Billy Graves worked in the South Bronx as part of an aggressive anti-crime unit known as the Wild Geese, he made headlines by accidentally shooting a ten-year-old boy while struggling with an angel-dusted berserker on a crowded street. Branded as a loose cannon by his higher-ups, Billy spent years enduring one dead-end posting after another. Now in his early forties, he has somehow survived and become a sergeant in Manhattan Night Watch, a small team of detectives charged with responding to all post-midnight felonies from Wall Street to Harlem. Mostly, his unit acts as little more than a set-up crew for the incoming shift, but after years in police purgatory, Billy is content simply to do his job.Then comes a call that changes everything: Night Watch is summoned to the four a.m. fatal slashing of a man in Penn Station, and this time Billy’s investigation moves beyond the usual handoff to the day tour. And when he discovers that the victim was once a suspect in the unsolved murder of a twelve-year-old boy—a savage case with connections to the former members of the Wild Geese—the bad old days are back in Billy's life with a vengeance, tearing apart enduring friendships forged in the urban trenches and even threatening the safety of his family.Razor-sharp and propulsively written, The Whites introduces Harry Brandt—a new master of American crime fiction.**

Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony’s family is not about to make that choice easy. As he tries to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital--a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony.Richard Price's Bloodbrothers is a soulful and often profane story of working-class life in the Bronx, and one young man's bruising initiation into adulthood.

Kenny Becker just dumped his girlfriend--the reasons are a little complex. Young and newly unemployed, his main assets at the moment are six-pack abs and a healthy libido--he’s ready to get out, find a little action, and maybe find himself too. But New York is no place for the lonely, and with one meaningless sexual encounter after another, Kenny begins to wonder if the singles scene is not itself a complete con job, with his heart and his future at stake. Raunchy, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, this 1978 clubland slice-of-life displays Richard Price in gritty good form.Review“A novel of passion and depth, written with great precision and control.”*—*The Washington Post Book World“Price knows the language, mores, herding instincts, and hunting habits of the bottom-class urban young just about as well as Margaret Mead got to know those who come of age in Samoa.”—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The *New York Times*“Ladies’ Man brilliantly portrays the dark side of youthful passion seeking release in a big-city environment.”—St. Louis Post-DispatchAbout the AuthorRichard Price is the author of seven novels, including Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He wrote the screenplays for the films Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best TV writing as a co-writer for the HBO series The Wire. Price was also awarded a Literature Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.