Lush Life

Lush life / Richard Price ; read by Bobby Cannavale.—New York : Macmillan Audio, 2008.
11 sound discs (13 hr.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.
Unabridged
Compact discs
ISBN: 9781427203205

1. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) – Fiction. 2. Police – Fiction. 3. Mystery fiction.

813. 54

Restaurant manager Eric Cash has had a bad night. He went out for a night of bar hopping with the new bartender Ike Marcus and a friend of Ike’s, who’s drunk even before the hopping starts. Just before they head into Café Berkmann, where Eric and Ike work, Ike is gunned down. Eric tells the cops that it was an attempted hold-up, and Ike’s last words were something like, "Not tonight, my man." But the cops are suspicious of Eric’s story.

Lush Life is a richly detailed police procedural set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the first years of the twenty-first century. Price, who grew up in a housing project in the Bronx has a real gift for dialog and speech and for the rhythm of urban life. The book has all the heartache and style of the Billy Strayhorn song with which it shares a title.