Samaritan

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.From the Hardcover edition. Ray Mitchell, a former TV writer who has left Hollywood under a cloud, returns to urban Dempsy, New Jersey, hoping to make a difference in the lives of his struggling neighbors. Instead, his very public and emotionally suspect generosity gets him beaten nearly to death. Ray refuses to name his assailant, which makes him intensely interesting to Detective Nerese Ammons, a friend from childhood, who now sets out to unlock the secret of his reticence. Set against the intensely realized backdrop of urban America, the cat and mouse game that unfolds is both morally complex and utterly gripping. Ray Mitchell returns to New Jersey to the housing project where he grew up to re-evaluate his life, but when he is found savagely beaten -- and refuses to press charges -- childhood friend Detective Nerese Ammons must uncover the truth