Richard Price, writing as “Harry Brandt,” has produced a procedural cum thriller. ILLUSTRATION BY ALVERO TAPIA HIDALGO. Reference:Ulf Andersen/Getty

As the sonnet was the quintessential form of the Elizabethan poet, packing distilled and dazzling language into its sleek fourteen lines and challenging every virtuoso of the day, so the quintessential form of the contemporary crime writer is the interrogation: two individuals in a room, one of them the suspect and the other the detective.

Here we have the essence of drama. We know that the stakes are high: a violent act is at issue. The setting is stark; the language is almost purely dialogue, with the unpredictable swerves of actual life and none of its rambling asides, graced by a swiftness of storytelling in a genre in which exposition, often improbable and sometimes belabored, must be provided somewhere before the final line of the final chapter. (Recall bravura interrogation scenes in such exemplary television dramas as “Homicide: Life on the Street,” an entire episode of which was given over to a protracted interrogation; “NYPD Blue”; and “The Wire.”) If contemporary crime fiction by such masters of the genre as Michael Connelly, Ed McBain, P. D. James, Ian Rankin, and Richard Price is imagined as a kind of Olympic event, the interrogation is the routine designed to lift a performance above the competition.

Price has been celebrated for his gift for dialogue—in particular, for the sinewy, idiomatic, rapid-fire speech of urban crime novels like “Clockers,” “Freedomland,” and “Lush Life,” in which police-procedural interrogation scenes are integral. He also wrote the screenplay for the Al Pacino police thriller “Sea of Love” (1989), and received an Edgar Award in 2007 for his work on several episodes of “The Wire.” In his new crime novel, “The Whites” (Holt), the first written under the pen name Harry Brandt, Price has constructed a maze of a novel that alternates between scenes of intense introspection and scenes driven by dialogue. The novel is built around a stoic N.Y.P.D. detective, Billy Graves, guilt-ridden over having accidentally shot a child many years before, when he was “coked to the gills,” and Graves’s secret nemesis on the force, a detective named Milton Ramos, who has become gripped by fantasies of revenge against Billy’s wife, Carmen, a woman he believes to have caused several deaths in his family.

As a Harry Brandt novel, “The Whites” is more of a policier than Price’s previous fiction—more plot-driven and less deeply engaged by the anthropology of its urban communities. In the incandescent prose of “Freedomland” (low-income housing in the fictitious city of Dempsey, New Jersey) and “Lush Life” (Manhattan’s Lower East Side, both indigenous and gentrified), setting, lavishly detailed, has the force of personality. In “The Whites,” the grim urban landscape is scarcely more than a backdrop. The author focusses on the interwoven lives of a number of characters in language as forthright and free of metaphor as a police report, and on the construction of an elaborate narrative that shifts between present and past action. Like Billy, demoted to Manhattan Night Watch since his controversial shooting of the child, the reader is confronted with a number of subplots that may or may not be related—these are the red herrings of genre fiction that mimic the false leads, dead ends, and frequent muddle of an actual police investigation. Dutifully read forward, detective fiction is written backward: clues that pass you by on a first reading should become evident if you reread.

“The Whites” doesn’t race so much as lurch and careen along, often with little breathing space between frenetic action sequences, emotional outbursts, and sheer surprise, but Price takes time out for a gem of an interrogation scene in the familiar “claustrophobic examination room that most detectives favored . . . the Box.” Here we observe Billy’s sympathetic yet pitiless evisceration of a former professional basketball player who has “accidentally” dropped his four-month-old baby daughter on the floor. Though unrelated to the tangled plot of “The Whites,” the scene allows us to see the detective in his element as a first-rate, instinctive interrogator of another guilt-ridden father who whispers at last, after Billy has led him to a tacit confession, “This is not me. . . . This is definitely not me.” Billy’s response is gentle: “I know.”

Many of the past actions that propel the present ones involve seven young detectives, among the most intrepid on the force, who formed an anticrime unit twenty years earlier. The “self-christened Wild Geese,” six men and one woman, are zealous and idealistic and physically impressive; assigned to a high-crime precinct of the East Bronx, they are “preternaturally proactive, sometimes showing up at the trouble spots two steps ahead of the actors,” and given to “chasing their prey through back yards and apartments, across rooftops, up and down fire escapes.” They came to be mythologized in the East Bronx: “It was all about family; they would do the job as required, but they would really step to the fore for those they deemed ‘worthy.’ . . . The Wild Geese, in the eyes of the people they protected and occasionally avenged, walked the streets like gods.”

Promoted to detectives, the Wild Geese begin by degrees to lose their idealism, and by middle age they have devolved into a straggling band of vengeance seekers. Their only merit would seem to be their code of loyalty toward one another, which involves, for the “good” cop Billy Graves, not informing on one another. In an odd usage, the author identifies those criminals with whom the detectives become most obsessed as “Whites”—the allusion is to Moby Dick, the White Whale that is Ahab’s preoccupation. The plot of “The Whites” springs out of this quandary:

They had all met their personal Whites, those who had committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice . . . . No one asked for these crimes to set up house in their lives, no one asked for these murderers to constantly and arbitrarily lay siege to their psyches like bouts of malaria.

Now, when most of the Wild Geese are retired from the force, each has a White whom the detective feels should be punished. (The reader wonders: only one?) This includes Billy Graves, who laments the continued existence of a killer named Curtis Taft, “the most black-hearted of the Whites,” whom he reëncounters in a hospital bed: