Samaritan, like its predecessors Clockers and Freedomland, is a police thriller. A crime is committed early on, the perp is unknown, and the story ends approximately when the investigating officer, always a major character, discovers who did it. (The legal machinations are always omitted. Price likes cops but seems to have no use for lawyers.)
Although the plotting is always handled competently, and the identity of the perpetrator is always difficult to guess, Price's real interests lie with motive. His novels are whydunits more than whodunits, which I guess you could say about all good novels. They are mysteries because human motives are mysterious.
In Samaritan the victim is Ray Mitchell, a former high school teacher and cabdriver turned television writer who, at loose ends, decides to move back to his own neighborhood and do good. Mitchell is assaulted and seriously injured. He knows who did it but refuses to talk. An old acquaintance of his from the neighborhood, Nerese Ammons, a twenty-year veteran with six months to retirement, winds up investigating the crime. The novel alternates chapters, to impressive effect, between the events leading up the assault and its aftermath.
Mitchell spreads his money around — pays for one woman's funeral, underwrites another man's T-shirt business — learning the hard way the truth of John Jacob Astor's remark: "Why does that man hate me? I never lent him money." It buys him first bemusement, then solicitation, and finally enmity and a serious whack upside the head. "Ray thinks he wants to make a dent," his ex-wife says, "when he really only wants to make a splash." Nerese, too, questions her own motives in bothering with this case when she could just ride out the last few months to her pension.
Ray himself is far from stupid, and he knows that his motives are mixed. He tells Nerese about blowing a big TV deal and taking it out on his daughter Ruby at the mall:
"We get in the mall and I say, 'Ruby, the hell with it. Let's just buy shit. Whatever you want, who cares...' She says, 'That's OK, I'll just look.' I'm like, 'Ruby, c'mon, I just swung a big deal [he's lying and she knows it], a dollar's like a penny today.' And I sort of bully her into buying some studs for her ears, can't get her to buy clothes, can't get her to buy any skin stuff, she grudgingly lets me buy her some teen magazine and it got really tense, the both of us like in this battle in the mall. And at one point she stops at a kiosk where they're selling belly-button rings, and she got hers pierced a few weeks before and I see her eyeing this one ring, sort of a curved silver rod with dice at either end and, I'm instantly breathing down her neck, 'You want that? You want that?' Which of course makes her want to run away. She says, 'Just looking,' and wanders off. I'm so panic-stricken, the minute her back is turned, I buy it plus two others, then I sort of mosey up behind her, say, 'Miss, did you drop these?' and show her the three belly-button rings in my hand and she, goes, berserk. She starts sobbing and screaming at me, 'Stop buying me stuff! Stop buying me stuff! Please! Daddy! Please! I don't want anything!'"
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