Publishers Weekly
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Price (Lush Life) is one whale of a storyteller by any name, as evinced by the debut of his new brand-okay, Brandt-a gripping, gritty, Greek tragedy of cops, killers, and the sometimes-blurry line between them. The sprawling tale centers on stoic police sergeant Billy Graves, banished to the purgatory of the NYPD's night watch since his role in a racially charged, politically explosive double shooting a decade earlier. Despite the adrenaline-pumping emergencies that routinely erupt during his 1-8 a.m. tour, he has time to obsess over his troubled wife, Carmen; his increasingly demented father, Billy Sr., a retired former chief of patrol; and, most of all, his "White" (that's what Billy, with a harpoon salute to Melville's tormented mariner, calls the one who got away): triple-murderer Curtis Taft. He's the elusive monster Billy is fated to hunt, probably even after retirement-to judge from the way Billy's former colleagues in the Bronx, a group calling themselves the Wild Geese, continue to hunt their own Whites. Suddenly, one of Billy's friends' Whites turns up murdered amid a St. Patrick's Day scrum at Penn Station. Soon a second disappears. And then it starts to look as if someone is stalking Billy's family. The author skillfully manipulates these multiple story lines for peak suspense, as his arresting characters careen toward a devastating final reckoning. Author tour. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Old tragedies combine with fresh ones in Brandt's steely-jawed, carefully constructed procedural. Few crime novelists are as good at taut storytelling as Richard Price (Lush Life, 2008, etc.), who, for reasons of his own, writes here under a pseudonym. But then, everyone in these pages is hiding bits and pieces of their lives and nursing secrets. Billy Graves, for instance, is well-known among Gotham's cops for having been an almost mythical crime fighter back in the day, until an errant bullet put a kid instead of a bad guy into the ground. Since then, Graves has been shunted from one graveyard shift to another, and though he nurses hard feelings, he's also glad just to have a gig in a time when it seldom seems that "the Prince of Peace was afoot." Certainly that's true when another perp of old turns up dead at just about the time it dawns on Billy that others nurse grudges, too: "Although money was the prime motivation for those signing up for a one-off tour with Night Watch, occasionally a detective volunteered not so much for the overtime but simply because it facilitated his stalking." The city quickly becomes a set for a sprawling, multiplayer game of cat and mouse, with vengeance not the province of the lord but of the aggrieved mortals below. Or, as one player ponders while assessing the odds, "To avenge his family, he would be destroying what was left of it." When vigilantes try to do the work of cops, no one winsbut how can there be justice in a place where everyone seems to consider the law a private matter, if not merely a polite suggestion? The grim inevitability that ensues follows lines laid out in such recent fiction as Mystic River and Smilla's Sense of Snowbut also, for that matter, in The Oresteia. In the wake of rage and sorrow, ordinary people respond by going crazy and screwing up. In this far-from-ordinary novel, Price/Brandt explores the hows and whys. Fasten your seat belt. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Loyal readers have been waiting seven years for the next masterpiece from Richard Price (following 2008's Lush Life), who delivers his latest crime opera under the Brandt pen name. Sgt. Billy Graves leads the Night Watch squad in Manhattan, prepping overnight crime scenes for morning detectives, when he begins investigating a fatal slashing at Penn Station. Billy discovers the victim has links to his old team, the Wild Geese, a group of young cops working violent crime back in the early 1990s. They've all moved on from the department except Billy, but they get together every month to have dinner and obsess, Ahab-like, on the Great White Whales who eluded their capture and continue to haunt their dreams. Thing is, a lot of their Whites seem to be dying at a surprising rate, and Billy can't ignore that his fellow Geese may be involved. Meanwhile, a fellow officer with a long-simmering vendetta against Billy's wife is about to complicate things even further. Verdict This "debut" novel from Brandt hews closer to the tropes of standard police procedurals than much of Price's best work, but whichever name appears on the cover, his books, with their crackling dialog and panoramic view of urban life, remain essential reading for all fans of crime fiction. [Audio edition previewed in Audio in Advance, 12/11/14; library marketing.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* Harry Brandt is Richard Price, a secret so open they stamped it on the book's cover. Price's motive in using a pseudonym for a work that fits so well with his previous works of crime and social realism (Clockers, 1992; Lush Life, 2008) is a mystery unless it's simply the publisher's desire to rebrand him. What is evident is that this is going to be a strong contender for best crime novel of 2015. Billy Graves commands the NYPD's Night Watch, catching suspected felons and handing them over to the day shift. It's a far cry from his glory days in the 1990s, when he ran with the Wild Geese, an anti-crime unit that bent rules and collared crooks in one of the toughest precincts of the East Bronx. Now scattered, each of the Wild Geese is obsessed with his own white whale, a stone-cold-guilty killer who has walked away from justice and now, as these whites start to meet violent fates, Billy wonders whether his former partners are behind the killings. Billy is a good guy, a husband, father, son, and boss doing the best he can under the circumstances, but his conscience isn't entirely clean, either: his own career took a turn after he shot and injured a 10-year-old boy in the course of an arrest.This is the stuff of thousands of cop novels: What are the limits of our justice system? Is it OK to take justice into your own hands? Can justice heal victims, or does it have its own cost? Does true justice even exist? But while those questions often provide excuses for cheap tales of vigilantism, Brandt is better than that. He isn't trying to answer them for everybody, just for his characters the mark of a great writer. With one-of-a-kind characters and settings so real you can smell them, Brandt plunges us into the chaos of domestic life, the true agony of a parent's grief, the cost of secrets kept and revealed. He does it all with indelible phrasing that captures both the black humor of the on-the-job cop and the give-and-take of longtime married couples. While the finely tuned story engine accelerates, it's supercharged with complications: there's another cop, not part of the group, whose own personal White is Billy's nurse wife, Carmen. And Carmen carries lifelong wounds from a crime, too. In the end, The Whites isn't about cops and killers so much as it is about the damage we all carry, the sins we've all committed, and the heartbreaking unlikeliness of forgiveness unless we can manage to forgive ourselves.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2015 Booklist