This is the third of Richard Price’s novels to center on the housing projects of the fictional city of Dempsey, New Jersey, and though it’s the proverbial page turner, both very entertaining and admirably serious, there’s a familiarity to the ground being trod that occasionally dampens the story’s impact. What once was fresh has become formula, though it’s not so much a matter of topic as of tone. The good news is that the combination of the lyrical and the gritty, which seemed so concise in 1992’s Clockers and then got lost in the sprawl of ’98’s Freedomland, once again obtains in Samaritan. The not-so-good news is that Price’s characters have become increasingly verbose, and that the author’s vaunted " ear for dialogue " (attested to by no less than Stephen King on the back of my review copy) has come to sound both mannered and improbable. One can easily imagine a parody of the style Price has arrived at; it would be a novel of down-and-outers where everybody is a master of the idiomatic anecdote and even someone who has come through the ravages of coke hell knows how to tell a story complete with names, dates, extraneous detail for coloring, and a knack for dramatic form, all thinly disguised by the linguistic tics of the supposedly inarticulate.

Samaritan is the story of Ray Mitchell, a guy in his early 40s who escaped the Dempsey projects and now has returned, a poor sap, with an ex-wife and a precocious 13-year-old daughter, who acquired a nasty coke habit before lucking out and becoming a writer for a popular TV show called Brokedown High. Ray is seeking redemption or resolution or God knows what; his motives are as obscure to himself as they are, at first, to the reader. He’s teaching a small elective writing class at his high-school alma mater, trying to reach a half-dozen or so indifferent students, ostensibly giving back to the community and all that. But for Ray, nothing is simple, and his every act of generosity, in and out of the classroom, has an edge. He seems to be suffering from some kind of emotional Tourette’s — he’s constantly wanting to bite back his words. And his Samaritan impulses are so hot-wired to his lack of self-esteem that he’s unable to give them a pleasing shape; the recipients of his grating kindness, especially his daughter, are alarmed by the naked need that comes with it.

Ray’s need leaves him open to danger, which arrives in the form of a brutal assault that lands him in the hospital with a serious head injury. Price has structured the book as a series of chapters that alternately take place before and after the attack, slowly filling us in on the events that led up to it and the ensuing investigation. The detective on the case is a woman named Nerese Ammons, a/k/a Tweety, a long-time Dempsey resident who received a crucial helping hand from Ray back during their shared childhood, when his instincts were less sullied by self-regard, and who takes on his case as a kind of payback mission. Once the plot starts to roll, Price shows himself to be so adept at the whodunit game — the teasing meting out of information, the convincing misdirections — that one has to quell the urge to rush through yet another I’m-gonna-take-my-time-here monologue to get back to the meat of the matter.

Of course, Price means to offer more than a clever puzzle; all his novels are empathetic stabs at social realism with, lately, an emphasis on the interaction between the races. Ray is white whereas Tweety and his students and most of the surviving inhabitants of the Dempsey projects are black or Hispanic, so there’s an extra layer of cautious indecisiveness in his fumbling efforts to be a good person. The relationships he has with his black lover (an extramarital affair on her part), her children, the neurotic hustler he’s mentoring, and his students are minefields for a man who already has a wobbly walk. Even the genuine affection between Ray and Tweety has the complicated subtext of a truce (there are places where one understands it’s best not to go). Price’s characters may bend your ear too much and too often, but they’re still much more than stick figures in a good mystery: sometimes heartrending and sometimes annoying in the way they’re true to life.