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    Freedomland
    Unavailable
    Freedomland
    Unavailable
    Freedomland
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Freedomland

    Written by Richard Price

    Narrated by Joe Morton

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In 1998, Richard Price returned to the gritty urban landscape of his national bestseller Clockers to produce Freedomland, a searing and unforgettable novel about a hijacked car, a missing child, and an embattled neighborhood polarized by racism, distrust, and accusation.  Freedomland hit bestseller lists from coast to coast, including those of the Boston Globe, USA Today and Los Angeles Times; garnered universally rave reviews; and was selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the Imus American Book Award and as a New York Times Notable Book.

    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 tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, 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 Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey 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. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 1, 2008
    ISBN9780739369975
    Unavailable
    Freedomland
    Author

    Richard Price

    Richard Price is the author of several novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.

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    Reviews for Freedomland

    3.5/5

    120 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I book that I found slow moving at first, but realized that it is just deep. A mystery wrapped up in a psychological thriller. A over seven hundred pages it's a marathon read, but feels more like a middle distance race, the pages fly by.
    • 4/5
      Freedomland is a "ripped from the headlines" story from 1998 obviously based on the Susan Smith story of 1994. Brenda Martin zombie walks to a hospital with bleeding hands and tells police she was carjacked in the projects by a black man and her son was in the car. It's obvious from the start that she's lying. But detective Lorenzo Counsel and reporter Jessie take turns babysitting her and keeping her from self-destructing while trying to get her to tell the truth.I listened to the audio version, not realizing I had checked out the abridged version until part way through. But now that I know the book was over 700 pages, I'm glad I had the abridged version. I don't think I could have taken a lot more of Brenda's quiet suffering and non-cooperation.I was really into the book at the beginning, but the characters seemed to become stereotypical partway into the book. I didn't like the cop out ending. I thought, "Are you serious?" I'm wondering if something was lost in the abridgment.
    • 4/5
      We saw the trailer and the plot tease made me curious, then the reviews said the book was better. A police procedural, about the cop and reporter working a missing child case in which the mom accuses a black man of carjacking and throws the community into racial rioting. Pretty good, though too slow moving at times.
    • 3/5
      I decided to read this book when I saw the advertisements on TV for the movie which came out earlier this year. With a cast of Morgan Freeman and Julianne Moore, and a promising storyline, I thought it would be a great read. Unfortunately, while the story was interesting, I felt like I was reading another "gritty thriller" that had little to stand out from other books in this genre. The charactors seemed to want to break free of the stereotypes that they were based on, but never seemed to free themselves from the confines of the "troubled detective" or "gritty reporter". An okay read, but not one I'd revisit, nor would I seek out other books by the author.
    • 4/5
      I hate to admit it, but this is one of those times when the movie was better, and that does not happen often.
    • 4/5
      Not Price's best, but any read of Price's is guaranteed to be page-turning and thought-provoking.