Freedomland - Cassette Author:Richard Price A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night. — So begins Richard Price's electrifying new novel, a... more » tale set on the same turf--Dempsy, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin's missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son's disappearance than she's admitting?
Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city's evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother's fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career.
As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsy and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsy and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin's story.
At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland> reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before.
Joe Morton has appeared in numerous feature films including Blues Brothers 2000, Executive Decision, Speed and the critically acclaimed Lone Star. On television, he appeared in such shows as Homicide, Equal Justice and A Different World. A gifted stage performer, he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in Raisin.« less
If you were disturbed by the (real-life)rash of white couples making up stories that blamed African-Americans for violent acts against their kids,(particularly when the parents were the killers), this will turn those horrible lies on their ear!