Pen name doesn't fool anyone: 'The Whites' is vintage Price

"The Electrifying Debut of a New Master of American Crime Fiction," shouts the back-cover headline on the advance review copy of "The Whites." Awesome!

Wait, what?

Richard Price is indeed a master, but he is hardly new. This book is the "debut" of Harry Brandt, the pen name Price used (sort of - "Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt" pretty much eliminates any subterfuge) for his new novel. The reasons for this involve the peculiar machinations of the publishing business - something about a book Price owed another publisher and an ill-conceived idea that he could crank out a boilerplate, plot-driven crime novel in a hurry, using a fake name to protect his literary brand.

But it seems Price/Brandt was incapable of dumbing it down. "The Whites" is full of the rich characters, spot-on dialogue, grim humor and distinctive insights that animate his other novels, including "Clockers" and "Lush Life." If we must stick this gifted writer into a genre, let's call it urban fiction rather than crime fiction. The crimes are not really the point.

The book's title refers to demons that interrupt the sleep of many veteran detectives. These cops are tormented by thoughts of the miscreants who escaped justice on their watch, killers of babies and kidnappers of young women and rapists of old ladies. The cops thought they had these dirtbags nailed, only to see them slip through the all-too-porous net of the American criminal justice system.

"Whites" are the never forgotten, forever pursued - like Ahab's white whale. As Price - sorry, Brandt - explains it, even when these cases are officially closed, the cops keep picking away at them - taking files home to read for the hundredth time, using precious days off to track down elusive witnesses. They are "always, always, calling the spouses, children, and parents of the murdered: on the anniversary of the crime, on the victims' birthdays, at Christmas, just to keep in touch, to remind those left behind that they had promised an arrest that bloody night so many years ago and were still on it."

Sgt. Billy Graves, the novel's protagonist, has a "white," a man named Jeffrey Bannion who got away with killing a kid years before. All the other members of the Wild Geese, a group of gung-ho officers Graves ran with in the '90s, have whites, too. Graves is the only one of the Wild Geese who's still a cop - one of his former colleagues owns a funeral home, another got rich in real estate, others took private security gigs.

Graves is commander of the night watch, a team of detectives who perform a sort of law-enforcement triage on the graveyard shift. By day, Graves struggles to get a few hours' sleep and spend time with his wife and two boys. By night, he and his team go to crime scenes, interview witnesses and collect an initial batch of evidence that they turn over to day-shift colleagues who work the cases.

On one of these wee-hours calls Graves finds Bannion murdered on a platform at Penn Station, a discovery that sets the stage for readers to learn the back stories of the other Wild Geese and their whites.

It's a convoluted tale with many characters and many sub-plots and sub-sub plots, and it can be confusing. But Price writes so well that losing track of a plot point here and there doesn't diminish the reading experience. Price is a New York writer to the core; the raw power of this great city seeps into the lives of his characters as they struggle with grief, betrayal and shame. They tamp down their demons as best they can with booze, money, sexual adventures, family ties and the memory of the unique-to-cops style of camaraderie they shared when they bestrode the city in the days of the Wild Geese.

Price writes with dense efficiency. Here, Graves visits a former colleague at the funeral parlor he now owns:

"Walking down the room-length particle-board partition that divided the chapel from a line of office cubicles. Billy passed Redman's elderly father in the first cubicle, Redman Senior leaning back in his chair playing computer poker. In the second cubicle, Redman's twenty-three-year old fifth wife, Nola, was lying on a daybed reading a book in her Cote d'Ivoirian accent to Redman's seventh or eighth son, Rafer, a toddler with a gastrointestinal feeding tube inserted into his stomach. And then finally, in the last cubicle, was the man himself, all six foot five of him, hunched over his desk slurping lo mein from a take-out carton, the spindly wire bookcase behind his back filled with unclaimed cremains in cardboard urns going back to the 1990s."

That's a whole novel in one paragraph.

Amid all of these complex characters and deep themes, Price doesn't neglect his duty to tell an engaging story. Much of the dramatic tension involves a troubled cop, Milton Ramos, who is nursing an ancient grudge against Graves' wife, Carmen, an emergency room nurse. A chance hospital meeting between Ramos and Carmen Graves leads Ramos on a path to revenge. There is a detour, a deft feint on Price's part, involving a love story and possible redemption for Ramos. It ends badly.

"Later that night," Price writes of Ramos in his hopeful, in-love phase, "it took him most of a bottle of Chartreuse to work up the resolve to quit drinking." But Ramos will consume a great deal more of his favorite French liqueur before his story ends. And the Wild Geese, roused from their civilian slumber, will test Graves' loyalty when they devise a new strategy to find closure with their whites.

Mike Snyder is an assistant city editor at the Houston Chronicle.