Six years on from the epic Clockers and Richard Price’s new novel finds him touting much the same gutter-poetry and street-swagger, but minus any of that book’s superior sense of storytelling. There Price realised that to power a novel over 600 pages, you just couldn’t rely on a meticulously realised cinematic and visual landscape, but need a narrative engine, characters - plot, even - to persuade us that this is more than mere journalism. He did his job beautifully, crafting equally compelling fiction and reportage. It’s a cart to which Freedomland clearly hasn’t been hitched.

Its plot, literally: 32-year-old Brenda Martin stumbles into a New Jersey hospital emergency room one night in the wake of a violent car-jacking. Such is her state that it’s a while before black cop Lorenzo Council realises that in back of the missing automobile was Brenda’s young son, Cody. A search is joined across the community for the child, including female reporter Jesse Haus, who befriends the distraught mother in hopes of an exclusive.

It’s a thin thread for 250 pages, let alone the 500+ Price demands of it. Sure, things are revealed, but they are not revelations - this book being essentially why more than whodunit - and its author’s attempts to play with the loaded gun of race look nothing less than crass. Brenda (white) claims her attacker was black and Price attempts manfully to run these threads through the racial hot-house that made Clockers so dizzying - "this whole thing is racist, double-standard bullshit" - but comes off looking like a bad imitation of himself. A book like this should be told through terse dialogue, description kept to an adjective-free minimum, but Price is too in love with research. And this from a man who spends so much time writing for Hollywood.

Relentlessly po-faced, its language witless and pedantic, Freedomland never takes flight, preferring to sit on the page and glower the reader into submission. If, like so many of Price’s books, it gets turned into a movie, then the necessary upping in pace and trimming of dead wood might just about save it, but in the meantime, it’s not worth reading this to find out.