By Grand Rapids Public Library
Price’s retro NYPD police procedural skips back and forward from the early “run and gun days” of the ’90s, to 20 years ahead, as a police group known as the Wild Geese lurch into middle age.
They’ve left the bad old days behind them (almost, kind-of — ok — never), as they continue on with new jobs, and struggle with past collateral damage. Because while they got the job done, and close relationships were forged, mistakes may have been made…
Detective Billy Graves is the only member of the Wild Geese still on the force, exiled to the Night Watch, after a fatal shooting. The world has definitely worn him out, and as he catches his reflection in a security camera he sees a man, “football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitch-fork’s worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac’s posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen’s discount.”
Once a month Billy’s old crew gets together for dinner, and talk often turns to the “whites”, the ones who got away with murder and eluded capture. As ill-fated an obsession for the Wild Geese as the whale was to Melville’s captain of the Pequod…
Price says that he “likes to use crime as a backbone” in telling his stories, which are more literary, psychological, and nuanced than I was expecting in a detective novel. We pay attention to one-on-one murder in a way that few other events command, and once Price has our attention he turns a spotlight on the everyday tragedies and triumphs of our lives. Nature or nurture? Society or our own inescapable biology? Ahab or Macbeth?
Blitzkrieg plotting, fine characterization, and dialogue are Price hallmarks, with side characters that lend an absurd touch of dark humor. Map out a few nights that you can stay up late, because once you get started, this is a novel you can’t put down.
