The Whites - Tapa dura

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)

Riveting . He not only has a visceral ability to convey the gritty, day-to-day realities of their jobs, but also a knack for using their 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 (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

This book literally interrupted my professional and personal life. Once in, I had to stay in and stick with it to the end ... as unstoppable as a train coming through a tunnel ... The Whites is a work of reportage as much as it is a work of fiction. That's what makes it important. It tells it like it is. It provides insight and knowledge, both rare qualities in the killing fields of the crime novel (Michael Connelly, New York Times)

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)

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)

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)

If a more powerful crime novel is published this year it will be a bleeding miracle (Evening Standard)

The Whites is a fine book about the corrupted moral universe in which his all-too-believable New York cops have to work . Billy is confronted by one hard choice after another as matters build to a tense finale (Mail on Sunday)

Magnificent, hugely complex tale of criminality, revenge and redemption (Metro)

Price has constructed a maze of a novel that alternates between scenes of intense introspection and scenes driven by dialogue . The Whites doesn't race so much as lurch and careen along, often with little breathing space between frenetic action sequences, emotional outbursts, and sheer surprise, but Price takes time out for a gem of an interrogation scene (Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker)