by Richard Price.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 455 pages. $26.

By Andy Smith
Journal Staff Writer

Richard Price is a master of the urban crime novel, with a superb eye for setting and a keen ear for the language of cops, criminals and victims. Better still, he’s able to show the underlying humanity of everyone from police bureaucrats out to get a messy crime off the front pages to small-time drug dealers in the housing projects.

(It’s telling that, in addition to novels such as Clockers and Freedomland, Price was a writer for HBO’s great saga of cops and crime in Baltimore, The Wire.)

The plot of Price’s new novel, Lush Life, spirals outward from a single crime that takes place on the streets of New York City’s Lower East Side.

Ike Marcus, a young bartender at a trendy restaurant in the neighborhood, is walking home after a night of barhopping with two companions when the trio is accosted by a pair of muggers. For some reason, Marcus doesn’t cooperate. “Not tonight, my man,” he says. There’s a shot, and Marcus falls dead.

Lush Life is not really a mystery, as we find out relatively quickly who fired the shot. Technically, it could be termed a police procedural, and Price is certainly savvy about the nitty-gritty of police investigation. But he goes beyond, using the crime as a way to examine the lives of those touched by it as well as the neighborhood where it took place.

Price depicts the Lower East Side as an uneasy mixture of white urban hipsters, desperate Chinese immigrants, and struggling blacks and Latinos from the nearby housing projects. Not to mention the ghosts of immigrants past, like the one who carved “Remember me” in Yiddish on a beam in the basement of the restaurant where Marcus worked.

The centers of the novel are Matty Clark, the cop investigating the murder, and Eric Cash, the manager of Marcus’ restaurant, who was with him when he was shot. Cash, at 35, is a would-be actor, would-be screenwriter, who is starting to realize his career isn’t going anywhere. Cash’s initial story of the mugging is so unconvincing that he is falsely accused of being the killer himself, and the whole experience sends him on a downward spiral of self-destructive behavior.

Even more affecting is the raw pain of Billy Marcus, Ike’s father, who goes from drunken rambling to sober outrage, and back again.

Occasionally, Price goes a touch over the top. He uses a memorial service for comic effect when one of Ike’s actor friends seizes the opportunity to promote himself rather than mourn the victim.

But all in all, he gives us a superb panorama of city life, moving effortlessly back and forth between his imperfect characters — cops, criminals, victims and bystanders — while never losing sight of what makes them tick LUSH LIFE,

asmith@projo.com