With his urgent, incisive new novel Freedomland, Richard Price returns to the fictional urban everytown of Dempsy, New Jersey, the dilapidated site of his thoroughly researched and perceptive look at the drug trade, Clockers. Four years ago, Price joined the horde of journalists covering the Susan Smith debacle in South Carolina, a case from which he's lifted the basic scenario and reimagined it in another setting, with very different results. Freedomland opens with the eerie, dream-like image of Brenda Martin, a young white mother, staggering listlessly into an emergency room, her hands slashed and bleeding, claiming she's been car-jacked by a black assailant with her son still in the back seat. The alleged incident took place near a tenement complex in the predominately poor, black Dempsy, aggravating the racial tensions between it and Brenda's neighboring city of Gannon, which is populated mostly by working-class whites. Her story is told from the perspectives of two fascinating figures: Detective Lorenzo Council, a lumbering father-figure to Dempsy residents who spends most of his investigation trying to keep the opposing sides at bay, and Jesse Haus, an aggressive reporter eager to get the scoop at all costs, even as it causes her fits of self-hatred. Freedomland is an enormously ambitious portrait of the decay of urban America, convincing both as an exposé of the mechanizations of racial disharmony and as a more intimate, sympathetic study of identity and the precariousness of motherhood. Price's characters are slippery and difficult, familiar in many ways yet impossible to reduce. So is his book.