NYC’s Lower East Side and Las Vegas serve as the backdrops for two novelists to craft their urban stories of crime and tragedy.

In his first book in almost eight years, Richard Price, the Bronx-born author of Clockers and Freedomland, as well as numerous screenplays, has produced Lush Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) an urban crime novel about the Lower East Side of Manhattan packed full of social detail and stunning dialogue. A writer for the HBO series The Wire, Mr. Price won the Edgar Prize in 2007, and was an Academy Award Screenwriting nominee for The Color of Money.

Beautiful Children (Random House), is a vividly rendered debut novel about Las Vegas, Charles Bock’s hometown. Las Vegas is a sprawling, grimy backdrop for a panoramic story encompassing a missing boy, strippers, pawn brokers, homeless teenagers, and musicians that speaks to a wider condition of American loneliness. Mr. Bock’s short fiction has been published in Esquire Magazine.