Synopsis
In his most extraordinary book to date, Richard Price returns to the familiar turf of his bestselling Clockers for a chilling and compelling look at contemporary America. Freedomland opens as a bruised and bloodied white woman named Brenda Martin stumbles into a Dempsey, New Jersey, emergency room, claiming that a black man stole her car with her four-year-old son in the backseat. Veteran detective Lorenzo Council is assigned to investigate the case, and despite reservations about Brenda's story, he launches an all-out search for the abducted boy. Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter for the local newspaper, also suspects that Brenda is hiding something, and she befriends the grief-stricken mother in an attempt to break the biggest story of her career. But as the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, smoldering racial tensions between the predominantly black city of Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon, threaten to explode.
Francine Prose
For all its grabby suspense and startling disclosures, Freedomland is infinitely more than a detective story. Despite its hipness, its up-to-the-moment street jive and cops-and-robbers jargon, it aspires to the heft and weight of a 19th-century Russian classic. It has that same capacity to shake up our unexamined assumptions about sin and forgiveness. In fact, Freedomland suggests some version of the novel that might have resulted if Anna Karenina had been hit by the train before the book began, and her wounded, restless ghost had returned from another world to haunt us, to make us look at ourselves and think a hundred times before we cast that first stone. -- The New York Times Book Review