Samaritan

Ray Mitchell's lucrative career as a television writer ends abruptly. The former high school teacher goes back to the New Jersey city where he was born, hoping to rethink his life, get closer to his teenage daughter and share some of his money with the housing project where he grew up. He takes up teaching again, begins an affair with a married woman from the old neighborhood and becomes a mentor to a former student who has just come out of jail.

Then Ray is found beaten nearly to death in his own apartment. He knows who attacked him, but he will not say, and he refuses to press charges. The case falls to Detective Nerese Ammons, who knew him as a child in the projects and must find a way to make him talk.

Nerese works on two fronts. She investigates the people in Ray's life who might wish him harm, and she listens to his feverish ramblings about the past they share as he drifts in and out of consciousness. Her task is to find the attacker, and also to understand a victim who seems more afraid of the truth than of the person who nearly killed him.

The novel is literary suspense about crime and punishment, character and place, and children and the adults responsible for them. It asks what happens when someone absorbed in his own generosity gives too little and understands too little, with tragic and dangerous results. Richard Price is an American novelist and screenwriter whose other books include Clockers and Lush Life.