The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt

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.

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The Whites is the crime novel of the year—grim, gutsy, and impossible to put down. I had to read the final 100 pages in a single sitting. I began being fascinated, and ended being deeply moved. Call him Price or Brandt, he knows everything about police life, and plenty about friendship: what your friends do for you… and what they sometimes do to you. Stephen King Whether you call it a crime novel or a mystery novel or a giraffe with polka dots is largely irrelevant—The Whites is, simply put, a great American novel. Dennis Lehane This is high-octane literature, with the best of Richard Price and his souped-up pseudonym Harry Brandt. Price/Brandt gets to the heart of those stories that everyone else refuses to tell. The Whites manages to patrol New York and deepen our sense of the city and all its dark corners. Colum McCann Richard Price isn’t fooling anybody with this Harry Brandt business; only he could have written The Whites. It has everything that makes his novels so wonderful—the dark humor, the intricate interleaving of character and plot, the deep research into the science of the streets, the moral gravity and the flawless, magical dialogue. Indeed the only credible thing to be said about Harry Brandt is that he has written one of Richard Price’s best books yet. Michael Chabon As unstoppable as a train coming through a tunnel… [Price] manages to give the story a fierce momentum, one that makes putting this book aside to sleep or eat or do anything else very difficult… This book literally interrupted my professional and personal life. Once in, I had to stay in and stick with it to the end. Michael Connelly, The New York Times Book Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Price is the author of eight previous novels—including The Wanderers, Clockers, Freedomland, and Lush Life—all of which have won universal praise for their vividly etched portrayals of urban America. He also wrote several episodes of The Wire, the acclaimed HBO series. The Whites is the first novel he’s written under the pen name Harry Brandt. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams.

VIDEOS & AUDIO

Richard Price Discusses “The Whites” with Editor John Sterling

What is A “White?” Richard Price Discusses his New Book’s Title

Richard Price Discusses His First Meeting with David Simon

AUDIO: Listen to an interview wtih NPR

Additional Praise for The Whites

A maze of a novel that alternates between scenes of intense introspection and scenes driven by dialogue… It is not, finally, a novel of clearly delineated solutions but a novel of conscience, fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity. Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker Riveting… [Price] has a knack for using…detective work the way John le Carré has used spy stories and tradecraft, as a framework on which to build complex investigations into the human soul… No one these days writes with more kinetic energy or more hard-boiled verve… A gripping police procedural and an affecting study in character and fate. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Seven years is too long for New Yorkers to wait for the next book from Richard Price but he’s finally here again with a stunning NYPD novel… The Whites is grippingly immersive, its characters and the world they move through, indelible. New York Daily News A gripping, gritty, Greek tragedy of cops, killers, and the sometimes-blurry line between them… Price is one whale of a storyteller by any name… The author skillfully manipulates [his] multiple story lines for peak suspense, as his arresting characters careen toward a devastating final reckoning. Publishers Weekly (starred review) This is going to be a strong contender for best crime novel of 2015… With one-of-a-kind characters and settings so real you can smell them, Brandt plunges us into the chaos of domestic life, the true agony of a parent’s grief, the cost of secrets kept and revealed. He does it all with indelible phrasing that captures both the black humor of the on-the-job cop and the give-and-take of longtime married couples. While the finely tuned story engine accelerates, it’s supercharged with complications… In the end, The Whites isn’t about cops and killers so much as it is about the damage we all carry [and] the sins we’ve all committed. Booklist (starred review) Fasten your seat belt... Old tragedies combine with fresh ones in Brandt’s steely-jawed, carefully constructed procedural. Few crime novelists are as good at taut storytelling as Richard Price… In the wake of rage and sorrow, ordinary people respond by going crazy and screwing up. In this far-from-ordinary novel, Price/Brandt explores the hows and whys. Kirkus Reviews