“...almost nobody made it out of the game in one piece, and almost everybody thought they would be the exception.” This story of a "Clocker" (illegal narcotics salesperson) and a homicide detective whose lives collide over a murder in a squalid part of New Jersey has a gritty realness that few other books can match, from the characters to the dialogue to the settings and even the various morally ambiguous situations throughout that fairly jump from the pages. That level of detail is not witho...

Stop being lonely and listen to the full review here.Price put together 600 pages of well-researched, unflinching, accessible language here, an accomplishment that I can’t help but applaud.I tell my students in my worldbuilding class that once the rules are established, you have to play by them, and can only break them for a damn good reason. Price knows the rules of the game well (both for drug dealers and corrupt cops) and we explore them with characters representing each side of that coin, wh...

”’It’s the cycle of shit and you can’t do nothing about it.’Rocco smiled and began beating his fists rhythmically on the table, distant jungle drums. ‘I believe in fear. I believe in punishment. I believe in revenge.’Mazilli said, ‘Fuck you, it’s true.’‘I believe that each man,’ Rocco said, raising his voice, ‘whether black, white, yellow or brown, is entitled to have his ass kicked free of charge, regardless of race, creed or color.’‘Cycle of shit,’ Mazilli shot back.” Strike is clocking; he...

Extraordinary. The story of a uniquely talented, scrupulously clean and intelligent teen-aged dope peddler in the projects, in some city in the north east. Spike sits on the benches with a bleeding ulcer, tolerating the daily inconveniences of thuggish cops and pondering his future. He is totally alone, caught between the urge to be upwardly mobile in the ultimately fatal drug trade, tutored by a hardened old (30 something) psychopath who runs an unending number of scams. This is a how-to about ...

A drug dealer is gunned down in a diner and the brother of another drug dealer is the prime suspect. Did he do it? That's what Rocco Klein wants to find out. But can he get the suspect's brother, a crack dealer named Strike, to cooperate?This is the fourteenth book in my Kindle Unlimited Experiment. For the 30 day trial, I'm only reading books that are part of the program and keeping track what the total cost of the books would have been.Like most people who have read this in recent years, I lov...

Detective Klein and Detective Mazilli are discussing the suspect they've just brought in. He's an author who's accused of recklessly wasting readers' time. That's something that'll get you 3 to 5 in New Jersey and up to 10 in New York where they take reading more seriously. The suspect is an oldish Jewish guy who's currently in the interrogation room looking bored. The charges relate to three long novels published between 1992 and 2008, Clockers, Freedomland, and Lush Life. Together these add up...

Amazing!!!Clockers tracks the parallel stories of two men on different sides of the drug game (one a young, mid-level, crack dealer, the other a homicide cop), revolving around a murder in Price's fictional New Jersey city of Dempsey. The engaging characterizations of these two men are what truly make this novel shine. From the dealer Strike (with his paranoia, orderliness, and his frustration with both his lower-level dealers and his perforated ulcer), to Detective Rocco (with his jaded outlook...

Clockers - the term refers to the low-level, 24-hour drug slingers staked outside the projects - was written in 1992, and takes place before then. Which is why it took me so long to figure out why the characters referred to the cops as "Furies." It's because the police drove Plymouth Furies. Natch. My disorientation has a point: this is a book that takes place in a world that most goodreads.com members have never been to. It's set in the fictional town of Dempsey, but is as real and bleak a look...

Like Dostoevsky meets Tupac and it's pretty awesome for it. An amazingly complex and l-o-n-g tale of half-flawed people negotiating the pretty bleak world of the north Jersey projects. Every time I thought one of the characters was stooping to stereotype, Price introduced another layer of ambiguity that made much of said characterization ring true. Best of all, the story is so long that no detail is extraneous; the author had time to make everything more or less add up to something. Even Strike'...

This was one of my favorite books of the 1990s. The burned-out cop character was a bit of a cliché, but the setting of the novel in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey housing project was the work of inspired journalism. Price had a lot of great insights in this work that could only have been the result of going out and being a witness to the world he was describing. As the great novelist once said, "You can't make this shit up."Take for example the scene of the cop giving the guy shit for walking int...