Ever since Rudy Giuliani rid the Big Apple of crack vials, broken glass, and poor people, New Yorkers haven't really been burdened by chalk-outlines to step over. Gentrification and Ambien lulls most neighborhoods to sleep by midnight. This relatively grit-less state of affairs causes old-guard city-dwellers to yearn for days when tourists were trapped by shadowy figures in Times Square—as opposed to the snare of Madame Tussauds' today—back when New York City was distinctly, for better or worse, New York City.

In The Wire co-writer Richard Price's latest novel, Lush Life, a tragic situation stemming from a stickup-gone-wrong is given the '70s treatment in its unreasoned violence—despite taking place on the chic, expensively heeled streets of the Lower East Side of 2003.

Ike Marcus, a bartender at the fictitious Café Berkmann on Rivington Street, is sweeping his sotted longtime friend Steve home along with an unpleasant coworker, Eric Cash, when two anonymous hoodlums roll out of the shadows, stick a gun into the light, and demand their money. Ike points a finger back at his assailant with the Post-ready headline, "Not tonight, my man." Ike is soon after dead.

The harrowing tale that follows picks up with Eric as he is wrongly accused of killing his not-friend by the police, thrown into the local Gitmo, and asked to help those same officers by acting as the sole eyewitness. The most compelling character, though, is Billy Marcus, Ike's grieving father, who, like Howard Beale from Network, goes crazy with frustration, eventually abandoning what family he has in order to help crack open the case.

But it is Price's unique language—pulled in equal parts from downtown 'zines, rap lyrics, and the innermost reaches of the police department—that makes the book worthwhile. Fans of The Wire may not find the streetwise might of their beloved Baltimore drama, but then now that the show's set to end, they won't have much choice.