Lush Life is a great read. I enjoyed it thoroughly and burned through it in a day and a half. It is a carefully crafted story but more of a police procedural than earlier books by Mr Price.
The story is told through dialogue, mostly the questioning of various witnesses to a brutal murder in the lower east side of Manhattan. Still, Samaritan remains my favourite Price novel. ( )

this a literary take on the police procedural that acurately captures the current scene on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As has been sited in several reviews it is richly layered with the various ethnic and economic classes that live there side by side. The young strivers, actors who are waiters and young professionals hanging out in chic bar-restaurants, the black and latino kids living in poverty in the city projects, the chinatown denizens and the jewish enclaves all populate the action.

the story's main protagonist is a hapless detective struggling against the politicos who run the department while his own broken marriage throws up a curveball. he sympathetically tries to hold down the grieving and broken father of the murder victim.

a good read that does not dissappoint. ( )

If I could give this book a 0 rating I would. I tried very hard to finish it and I couldn't. It's touted as a mystery but after reaching page 338/740 and still not seeing any mystery, I had to quit. I felt as if I was reading a really bad Law and Order episode that just went on and on and on. I'm not sure how this won all the awards?! I of course wouldn't recommend to anyone.

About a man killed during a botched hold-up by two young punks and the time the NYPD out of lower Manhattan spends trying to track down the perpetrators. ( )

Reading Lush Life is like reading an extended episode of HBO's series "The Wire." Not coincidentally, Price writes for the series and was recently nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for his writing on the show.
The novel starts with the murder of a young screenwriter and bartender in a botched mugging in the early morning hours in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and ends with a gunman confessing, but what happens in between is anything but ordinary. Price explores the relationships and boundaries between victims, perpetrators, witnesses, cops, and their families. In the end, the murder is solved, but we know it is only a matter of moments before another will occur and the web between victim, perp, wit, and cops will be woven anew. ( )

Price absorbs you right into his "Lush Life" universe, no shock of entry, no sense of disorientation. You ride alongside each of his flawed characters, the setting confined and instantly familiar, like the inside of a snow globe. ( )