Synopsis
Dempsy, New Jersey, is right across the river from New York City, and Ray Mitchell has returned there--his home town--from Los Angeles, where he has made a bundle as a screenwriter. Ray is white, and when he is attacked and badly beaten, Nerese Ammons, a black police detective, takes the case, even though she is close to early retirement. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2003-01-01 | | Series: | Ay Adult - Price |
| Size | | Length: | 377 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.7 in | | Thickness: | 1.4 in | | Weight: | 26.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
After a lucrative television writing career comes to an abrupt end, ex–high school teacher Ray Mitchell returns to the New Jersey city of his birth—to rethink his life, reconnect with his teenage daughter and to spread the wealth on the housing project that reared him. He begins teaching again, embarks on an affair with a married woman from the old neighborhood and becomes a mentor to a former student recently released from jail.
Then, disaster: he is found beaten nearly to death in his own apartment. He knows who did it, but he’s not talking, and he refuses to press charges.
It is up to Detective Nerese Ammons—a childhood acquaintance from the projects—to get Ray to tell her what happened.
Alternating between investigations of the people in Ray’s life most likely to do him harm and listening to his fevered ramblings about their shared past as he slips in and out of consciousness, Nerese is charged not only with uncovering the perpetrator of this assault but with understanding what kind of victim is more afraid of
the truth than of his potential murderer.
The Washington Post Book World has hailed Richard Price as having “the best equipment a novelist can have—that combination of muscularity, insight and compassion we might call heart.” Samaritan is an electrifying story of crime and punishment, of character and place, of children and their keepers—a novel of literary suspense that explores what happens when, caught up in the drama of one’s own generosity, too little is given, too little is understood and the results threaten to prove both tragic and deadly.
Industry Reviews
"The mastery of urban melodrama that Price demonstrated in literate blockbusters like CLOCKERS and FREEDOMLAND keeps growing and deepening....Magnificent stuff."
Kirkus Reviews (11/01/2002)
"Price portrays Mitchell's anxious desire to connect with dead-on, heartbreaking accuracy...."
Bookforum - Kera Bolonik
"SAMARITAN is a perplexing read, especially for those who, like me, consider Richard Price a major talent. The Dempsiads, for all their strength, are losing steam."
New York Times Book Review - Mark Costello (01/05/2003)
"...Price yields up not just the familiar, blanched moonscape of urban blight but the inner lives and jack-hammering hearts of those who pace and patrol it."
New Yorker (01/20/2003)
| See an error? Submit a change request |
All rights reserved.
