The finer points of helping out

St. Paul knew what he was talking about when he said, "Charity suffereth long." It's been suffering an identity crisis lately. Two years ago, Nick Hornby examined the personal costs of philanthropy in a comic novel called "How to be Good." Last year, in "A Bed for the Night," David Rieff claimed that international relief organizations create a debilitating culture of dependency among their starving beneficiaries.

And now comes Richard Price's "Samaritan," with an alarming EKG on a bleeding-heart liberal. All these books raise unsettling questions about the limits of charity and the conflicted motives that inspire it. But Price's novel, without the satiric exaggeration of Hornby's comedy or the depressing futility of Rieff's exposé, is most likely to scrape one's tender good will.

Price tells what should be a feel-good story about a divorced dad who returns to his old neighborhood to give something back. A few years of writing for a TV drama have given Ray Mitchell enough cash to retire and volunteer at the grungy school he graduated from 25 years ago. His writing class attracts only a few students, but walking up the down staircase, Ray is thrilled to think he's going to save these needy black kids with the power of his unconditional white love.

Unfortunately for Ray, this inspiring plan is interrupted after a month, when he's found nearly beaten to death in his apartment. Perhaps these are more dangerous minds than he realizes.

Detective Nerese Ammons must hang on for only a few months before she can retire after 20 years of service and begin a new, much less stressful career. As a black woman in a mostly male, mostly white department, she's had enough struggles on and off her beat. But hearing of Ray's assault sparks a memory of the time he helped her when they were both children, living in the same housing project.

Nerese decides to take the case and pay him back for that good deed, but as he recovers from surgery, Ray refuses to name his assailant. That strange stance only solidifies her interest, and the two of them begin a month-long standoff during which she investigates and he begs her to stop.

Price has structured this relentlessly engaging novel in alternating chapters that take us through the weeks before Ray's assault and the steps of Nerese's investigation afterwards. Every time she uncovers a clue, flashbacks allow us to see that it's really just another dead end, a misleading coincidence that brings us no closer to knowing who tried to kill this selfless teacher.

But gradually, the nature of Ray's mind becomes even more mysterious than the condition of his head. As Nerese interviews his friends and family, she discovers that donating his time to a bunch of mostly unresponsive high schoolers wasn't Ray's only act of charity. In fact, a string of canceled checks indicates that he's strikingly generous. After two decades of exposing the seedier side of human nature and sensing the whiff of shame that hovers around Ray, Nerese assumes that he's fallen back into a drug habit or an affair that's turned to blackmail.

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