SAMARITAN by Richard Price - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK

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. 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. Now a New Jersey schoolteacher who has quit his job writing for a schmaltzy TV show and tries to sell ghetto kids on the charms of creative writing, he 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.