Jack Vettriano DriftersJack Vettriano Dressing to KillJack Vettriano Dream Lover
Book critics talk a lot about "crime novels" that "transcend" their "genre." Lush Life doesn't transcend anything, it simply is a great novel of social observation. This is what Dickens would be doing if he Price's playground is the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a tiny area that hyperdevelopment has made, if anything, overly lush and The title character of Sittenfeld's novel is Alice Blackwell, a Midwestern girl whose bio — raised in a small-town, degree in library , married to the ne'er-do-well son of a powerful political family — mirrors that of a certain soon-to-be-former First Lady. But you don't need to be interested in the Bushes or in to reap this novel's rewards. In her best-selling debut Prep, Sittenfeld established herself full as it is with rich white hipster bars, tenements full of wannabe artists, poor black projects, and all kinds, all packed together into too-close quarters. One night a drunk white aspiring actor (i.e., a bartender) gets shot to death by two black teenagers. The witnesses are unreliable at best. The cops — cops are to Price what saints were to Michelangelo — who work the case do so cynically, sardonically, bitterly and with fanatical tenacity, all while uttering the best dialogue being written anywhere by anybody.
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