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Samaritan ::
OK, so I haven’t been reading much at all for the past few months. As a result, any attention paid to this corner of the site has fallen off as well. I don’t want to call it a vicious circle, but it does seem that the resulting atrophy has built upon itself, become more of an issue, until I’ve gotten to the point I’m at now, where I finish a single book, then have to retroactively write a review for it in the previous month, because I was incapable of getting something written in time.
It’s foolish, really. And I have no excuse for my behavior. Or at least I have no excuse worth mentioning here.
But let’s focus on the book at hand, shall we? The good news is, Samaritan is a great book. It tells a compelling story of a guy who is beaten to within an inch of his life in his own apartment, and then won’t come forward to say who the attacker was. The underlying question of course is, why? and the resulting persuit on the part of the police detective assigned to the case (who is, incidentally, a childhood friend) is really an exploration of the nuances of the main character. His flaws, his strengths, his emotions all come begin to come clear, and it is pretty clear that in the end, while Richard Price was interested in creating drama and suspense within the story, his real interest was in creating a person who we could understand and and with whom we could empathize, even if we did find his behavior to be a dispicable at times.
The bad news is, this book wasn’t the best character-driven tale I’ve read. That was something I was hoping for when I got the book, in part because I love Richard Price’s work, but also (unfortunately), I bought into the publisher’s marketingspeak somehow. But that’s OK -- a disappointment from Richard Price is still significantly better than ninety percent of the stuff being published these days.
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