Richard Price Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Harry Brandt Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Richard Price is a fiction and crime author born in the Bronx, The United States. He also writes under the pen name Harry Brandt. He was a middle-class Jewish child raised in a housing project in the Bronx.

In 1967, Price graduated from Bronx High School of Science and was later awarded a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia. The author has been a writing teacher at Yale, Columbia, and New York University.

He was interviewed on the NPR show in 1987 when it began. He won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

Lush Life
There are two different faces of New York Lower East: a high-priced bohemia and a home of hardship where the residents are pushed to the edges. Eric Cash is one of those residents and has had big dreams while growing up. He had a lot of titles, such as actor, artist, and screenwriter.

Now he’s thirty-five years old, living on the Lower Eastside, and still running a restaurant business serving the people he wanted to be. He’s a failed writer and actor and has come to accept that he is never going to achieve his dreams.

His work in the restaurant is to manage the activities and ensure the smooth running of things. Although he’s the manager, he feels like giving up since he is tired of waiting for his dreams to come true. Ike was a handsome young man liked by most people, and if you asked him what he did to earn a living, he wouldn’t tell you tending a bar. Eric always envied him due to his confidence and hard work.

One day while Eric, Ike, and Ike’s friend Steven are coming out from drinking, they are attacked by muggers. Ike was shot to death. Eric is the prime suspect, but they can’t arrest him without enough evidence.

He sees his coworker Ike being murdered and narrates how he witnessed the incident. Was he just a witness, or did he shoot him instead? If he isn’t the killer, then who is it?

The case is assigned to two detectives, Matty Clark and Yolonda Bello, who try their best to catch Ike’s killer. Matty is a divorced man and father of two grown sons. He has been around them while they were growing up and is indifferent to them where he confuses them. However, he has always shown dedication to his job.

Yolonda is a part of the city housing projects and has always been a gentle ear to Matty. Billy Marcus mourns his son by starting his investigations, while Eric feels frightened having witnessed Ike getting killed.

The story is set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, showing an area filled with all sorts of humanity. The author offers his skills as a master of dialogue and dialect while speaking in many diverse voices, which are all convincing.

Lush Life is a complex and gritty crime story that you’ll find engaging. All the characters are well written with enough details to make the story rich and exciting. The novel is about murder, and its immediate aftermath is engaging to follow.

Clockers
When an ounce dealer is killed in cold blood in the street, the first person suspected is Vincent Dunham. Vincent is a hardworking father and a husband and the most unlikely person to be a murderer. Rocco’s so sure that Vincent isn’t capable of killing anyone and that his brother, Striker, is the killer.
Strike is finally free to get off his benches and go for the greener pastures with the ounce killer no more. As Rocco is trying hard to push the investigation, he’s unsure who will support him among his partner and the system while digging deeper into the case.

Strike sits on the benches tolerating the inconveniences brought by thuggish cops while reviewing his life. He’s alone and caught up in the middle of a dangerous drug business controlled by a psychopath with countless scams.

Strike isn’t happy with the cut-off meant to pay the supply chain mechanics on the street and the complex system of police payoffs. Strike feels drawn to Rocco’s world after his brother is blamed for the Murder. However, he’s unaware of this since he has to deal with the enigmatic and terrifying Rodney, a drug dealer operating a convenience store, who preaches to his young clockers about always saving by buying real estate.

Strike also used to be a mentor to young Tyrone until Tyrone’s mother stopped him.
Even though Clocker’s novel is built around murder, it isn’t a murder mystery since the author mentions who did the crime; the only secret to be revealed is why he did it. The story is told in alternating points of view, switching between the detective’s point of view –Rocco and a clocker’s point of view- strike.
Its parallel stories of two men on opposite sides of the drug trade game revolving around the murder in Price’s fictions New Jersey City.

Freedomland
The story opens up with a white woman having gushy and bloody hands going into the inner-city emergency room. She says that she has just been robbed a car by a black man. Additionally, her son, who was sleeping in the back seat, has now disappeared in the night.

Lorenzo Council is given the task of investigating the case of the missing child of Brenda Martin. Lorenzo is the son of a local targeted at the crime scene. He starts an all-out search to find the abducted boy while exploring a different possibility.

Might Brenda have more details on her son’s abduction than she is telling? Besides Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, a young and hardworking reporter working for the evening paper in the city. Jesse is quick to suspect that Brenda is hiding something.

She finds a way of getting into the mother’s fragile world while pretending to be her friend, knowing so well she might get the biggest story in her career journey. As the search for the suspected carjacker becomes intense, racial tension increases between Dempsey and its white neighbor Gannon.

The hostility between the two cities threatens to become violent after the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey, reporting that he’s the suspect. The media flood the area and the mood changes to ugly, and it’s now up to Lorenzo to take any desperate measure to know the whole story of Brenda Martin’s case.
The story is set on the turf of Dempsey, New Jersey, just like Clockers novel.