Richard Price, American author and screenwriter write crime fiction with a social conscience giving us razor-sharp anatomy of an ever-changing Harlem.

In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.

East Harlem, in 2008, a five-storey tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash, resulting in several deaths. Anthony Carter, a recovering drug addict is retrieved from the rubble buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, some 36 hours later, his miraculous survivial, transforms him into a man with a massage and a passionate sense of mission. Felix Pearl, a young transplant to the city, whose photography and film work that day provokes in this previously unformed soul a sharp sense of personal destiny. Royal Davis- owner of a failing Harlem funeral home, whose desperate trolling of the scene for potential customers triggers a quest to find another path in life.

 Mary Roe – a veteran city detective who, driven in part by her own family’s brutal history, becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing. Their personal histories form a generic inventory of woes, frustrated ambitions, estranged partners,  hustlers and eccentrics. “A self-styled clairvoyant, marching up and down the block wordlessly ululating like a titanic flute”. An imperious laundromat owner, “Bald and fat as a zeppelin … sat perched on top of a medium height ladder, just high enough that the women needing to pay for the drop-off load … had to lift their chins and raise their arms to him as if they were appealing to a God”.

Anthony castigates himself as “a preening fraud, a self-aggrandizing conman”, he is not entirely unsympathetic. He’s in fact trying to be better person, and his corny ministrations seem to bring solace to people in need. Mary is energised by her encounter with another dubious chancer, a tall woman who goes around claiming to be the mother of the late pop star, Prince. Her story sounds improbable, but people lap it up anyway. “ She had this knack of lifting people’s  spirits up. It was really something to see”. Price has sought to transpose on to narrative fiction a stylised mode of story-telling.

Lazarus Man by Richard Price, Corsair/Farrar, Straus and Giroux £22/$29, 352 pages.