Samaritan

The New Yorker

For more than two decades, in gaunt, endlessly alert prose, Price has embraced areas of the city, which have most novelists rolling up their car windows. Here Ray Mitchell, a New Jersey schoolteacher who has quit his job writing for a schmaltzy TV show and now tries to sell ghetto kids on the charms of creative writing, answers his door and gets his skull bashed in. Ray -- whether out of fear or shame -- refuses to say a word about what has happened to him, but, digging in his past, the investigating cop finds plenty to give her pause: a coke habit, a neglected daughter, and a recent affair with a drug dealer's wife. This is a crime in which the victim is the real mystery. Giving new meaning to the term "inner city," Price yields up not just the familiar, blanched moonscape of urban blight but the inner lives and jackhammering hearts of those who pace and patrol it.

Paul Evans

Tweetie, a ten-year-old black girl, is hit with a bat in the housing project where she lives; Ray Mitchell, a young white neighbor, stanches the blood and offers solace. Decades later, Tweetie has become Detective Nerese Adams and is tackling the last case of her tough career: investigating the beating of the same Ray Mitchell, who had returned from a TV-writing stint in Los Angeles to teach at an inner-city high school. Thus begins another of Price's first-rate urban morality plays—a compassionate, politically savvy whodunit that reads like Dostoevsky circa 2003. The author of numerous street-smart epics, including Freedomland, Clockers, Blood Brothers and The Wanderers, Price is renowned for in-your-face fiction: violent, fast paced yet philosophically complex. The screenwriter of such films as Sea of Love and The Color of Money, he's also demonstrated a flair for believable dialogue and visual detail. Whether celebrating black culture or the struggle of the white working class—his signature themes—he proves himself to be one of our best chroniclers of big-city experience.

Publishers Weekly

After a stint writing for a popular television show, Ray Mitchell has returned to his old New Jersey neighborhood to teach at his alma mater. Rethinking his life and trying to reconnect with his teenaged daughter, he soon suffers a terrible assault: he's nearly killed by a vicious blow to the head in his own apartment. He knows who did it, but is keeping mum. An old neighbor from the projects, Nerese Ammons, is the ready-to-retire detective assigned to Mitchell's case. She slowly tries to tease out of Mitchell any clues she can, learning about his past as well as about the relationships he has developed since his return. She's especially interested in Mitchell's battle with drug addiction and his current affair with the wife of a recently released convict. Boatman superbly recites this tale. He uses subtle changes in his tone and delivery to identify each character. Though his voice remains calm throughout the story, he maintains a palpable level of intensity that will keep listeners locked in to the details of Mitchell's tumultuous life. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 2, 2002). (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. It is a harsh lesson that Ray Mitchell learns, much to his regret. A successful white writer for television, he has come back to the predominately black New Jersey housing projects where he grew up. While trying to reconnect with his alienated teenage daughter, Ray volunteers to teach a writing class at his old high school. When he is found brutally beaten, his head crushed, Detective Nerese Ammons decides to find the culprit as a return favor to Ray; they are old acquaintances from the neighborhood, and Ray once helped her out when they were children. But Ray's refusal to identify his attacker doesn't make her job easy. Price's seventh novel returns to the gritty, decaying urban world of Clockers and Freedomland; once again, his characters are fully fleshed-out human beings, his dialog sharp and true. And Price's take on the nature of generosity (is the giving for the benefit of the receiver or the giver?) is a fascinating one. Like Nerese, however, readers will become impatient with Ray's "selfish selflessness"; the guy is basically a jerk. A dark, depressing novel for larger collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/02.]-Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The mastery of urban melodrama that Price demonstrated in literate blockbusters like Clockers (1992), and Freedomland (1998) keeps growing and deepening-as evidenced in his seventh novel. It's the story of a neighborhood and of conflicting ways of life, set in Price's fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, not far from New York City. And its central figures are two 40-something former neighborhood acquaintances: white TV scriptwriter Ray Mitchell, who has returned from La-La-Land newly wealthy, to teach a writing course at his old high school-and, just possibly, reconnect with his teenaged daughter Ruby; and black police detective Nerese Ammons, whose planned early retirement is delayed when she learns that Ray has been savagely beaten by an assailant whom he refuses to identify. A virtuoso alternation of advancing action with detailed flashbacks shows how Nerese's investigation into this mystery raises troublesome ghosts from the past, while also introducing a boldly drawn gallery of involved and potentially guilty characters. The prime suspects appear to be Danielle Martinez, the wife of a jailed drug dealer, with whom Ray has a brief, intense affair; the murderous Freddy Martinez himself; and Coley Rodgers (a.k.a. Salim El-Amin), a luckless denizen of Dempsy's mean streets who takes mercenary advantage of liberal, big-hearted Ray's impulses to be a good "Samaritan" to those less fortunate than he. That latter dynamic is analyzed with a ferocious admixture of bleak wit and sorrowful compassion, and the story positively vibrates with Price's trademark virtues of pinpoint observation (e.g., Nerese notices a TV set "so recently purchased that a few minute shreds of static-charged packing foam stillclung to the gunmetal-gray-frame") and punchy dialogue (a onetime repeat offender wryly boasts, "I don't just have a record, my man, I have a fucking album"). And the killer climax and ironic dénouement couldn't be improved upon. Magnificent stuff. If Elmore Leonard broke out of genre and were 30 years younger, he'd be Richard Price. First printing of 150,000; author tour