Lush Life

I finished Lush Life. While I enjoyed it, I was a bit disappointed, only because I liked Samaritan so much. Where this book suffers was in doing too much. Samaritan was a much simpler story and was better for it. It focused on two interesting and compelling main characters. Lush Life had about six main characters: the lead cop, his partner, the victim's coworker/key witness, the victim's father, the victim's father's wife, the perpetrator, and a roving band of "quality of life" cops. Particularly near the end, Price keeps jumping between all these various elements, sometimes with unnecessary detours. One of the main characters, a youngish restaurant manager who was the victim's supervisor (the victim was the bartender) and was with him when he was killed, wasn't very interesting. He just seemed like a real jerk; taking advantage of his mentor-type boss to try to deal coke in the restaurant while sleeping with one of the waitresses he cares nothing about. He also holds up the investigation after being wrongly accused of the crime (his gut-wrenching initial interrogation is very well written, perhaps the book's best moment). I really liked the main cop's Latina female partner. She came from a poor neighborhood and worked her way out of it. She therefore has more empathy (not necessarily sympathy) for the denizens of the communities in which they generally work. I wish she'd had more time in the book.