Reading his own newspaper’s obituaries, veteran reporter Carter Ross comes across that of a woman named Nancy Marino, who was the victim of a hit-and-run while she was on the job delivering copies of that very paper, the Eagle-Examiner. Struck by the opportunity to write a heroic piece about an everyday woman killed too young, he heads to her wake to gather tributes and anecdotes. It’s the last place Ross expects to find controversy—which is exactly what happens when one of Nancy’s sisters convinces him that the accident might not have been accidental at all.
It turns out that the kind and generous Nancy may have made a few enemies, starting with her boss at the diner where she was a part-time waitress, and even including the publisher of the Eagle-Examiner. Carter’s investigation of this seemingly simple story soon has him in big trouble with his full-time editor and sometime girlfriend, Tina Thompson, not to mention the rest of his bosses at the paper, but he can’t let it go—the story is just too good, and it keeps getting better. But will his nose for trouble finally take him too far?
Brad Parks’s smart-mouthed, quick-witted reporter returns in The Girl Next Door—another action-packed entry in his award-winning series, written with an unforgettable mix of humor and suspense.
Quick Version:
Brad Parks' debut, Faces of the Gone, won the Nero Award for Best American Mystery and the Shamus Award for Best First Mystery. In doing so, Parks became the first author in the combined 60-year history of the Nero and the Shamus to win both awards for the same book. Library Journal called Faces of the Gone "the most hilariously funny and deadly serious mystery debut since Janet Evanovich's One for the Money." Yahoo.com called Brad "the literary love child of (Janet) Evanovich and (Harlan) Coben." Brad's second book featuring investigative reporter Carter Ross, Eyes of the Innocent, releases February 1, 2011. Michael Connelly cheered, "Eyes of the Innocent is the complete package. With wonderful prose, witty observations and a relentless drive, this book held me hostage until the last page." The third and fourth books in the series are also written and awaiting publication. Parks is a Dartmouth College graduate who spent a dozen years as a reporter for The Washington Post and The Newark Star-Ledger and is now a full-time novelist. He lives with his wife and two small children in Virginia.
Much Too Long (And Sometimes Silly) Version:
Much like his fictional hero, Brad Parks is probably the whitest man to venture into the neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey in at least a half-century. A New Jersey-born, Connecticut-bred WASP, he likes to sing a cappella, wear sweater vests and play tennis. So he doesn't quite blend when he plunges into a Newark housing project. But that was where his job as a news feature writer for The Star-Ledger often took him - and where he found inspiration for the adventures of Carter Ross, the sometimes-dashing investigative reporter.
For Brad, it's a long way from where he began as a writer. His first work was a novella, completed in the second grade and self-published with the help of his mother's stapler. Best categorized as a nature thriller, it was about a bear and his friends - except Brad spelled "bear" with two e's. The adventures of the beer in the woods was well-received within the Parks household, but achieved little outside acclaim.
Brad started writing professionally at 14, when he discovered two important things about his hometown newspaper, The Ridgefield (Conn.) Press: One, it paid freelancers 50 cents a column inch for articles about local high school sports; and, two, it ran most submissions at their original length. For Brad, that meant he could make more money writing than babysitting. For the parents of girls basketball players in Ridgefield, Conn., that meant glowing accounts of their daughters' games that ran on for no less than 40 inches.
After this lucrative start, Brad attended Dartmouth College and began writing for anyone kind enough to give him a byline, sometimes covering the same football game for three publications - all of which, thankfully, had different deadlines. His junior year, he started his own newspaper, a weekly sports publication he produced in his dorm room called, appropriately enough, The Sports Weekly. (Brad thought of the name himself). In addition to being the founder, he was also the editor-in-chief, publisher, assignment editor, layout editor, ad salesman, controller, and distributor. The staff was never larger than about eight, including his then-girlfriend, now-wife Melissa, who was forced to copy edit just before Brad rushed off to the printer at 6 a.m. every Monday. A commercial and editorial success, The Sports Weekly claimed a circulation of 4,000.
During the summer, Brad began working for slightly larger publications, interning at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa - a distinction that pleased his parents immensely but never served any practical purpose - he was hired The Washington Post in 1996. At the time, he was the youngest staff writer at the paper and received perhaps its lowliest assignment: Covering high school sports out of the Manassas (Va.) Bureau. Still, the people he wrote about kept it entertaining. There was the one-armed coach accused of kicking one of his players, the basketball player who bit one of his competitors on the cheek during a playoff game, the softball player who asked Brad to her senior prom, and so on.
After two-plus years at The Washington Post, he moved to The Star-Ledger in 1998 for the opportunity to cover higher profile sports. For the next six years, his assignments included virtually every major sporting event from the Olympics to the World Series, from the Masters to the NBA Finals, from the Super Bowl to the Buff Bowl (contested at a Tampa-area nudist colony). His work during that time was recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the National Headliner Awards, the National Association of Black Journalists, the New Jersey Press Association and others. He also earned many frequent flier miles.
Married in the summer of 2004, Brad happily ended his days as a traveling sportswriter and switched to "real" news. He covered a broad swath of local and national events, everything from small-town pizza wars and schoolyard spats gone awry to Hurricane Katrina. His 40-year retrospective about the Newark riots (www.nj.com/newark1967) won the New Jersey Press Association's top award for enterprise reporting in 2007. He also covered a quadruple homicide in Newark, which provided the real-life launching point for the fictional manuscript now known as "Faces of the Gone."
In 2008, with the newspaper industry crumbling, Brad decided to leave the business and become a full-time author/stay-at-home Dad to his two young children/freelance journalist. His wife found a job in Virginia, they sold their house in New Jersey, and with the moving vans less than two weeks away, Brad got The Call from his agent, Jeanne Forte Dube: She had landed him a two-book deal with St. Martin's Press. Carter Ross and his friends would have their exploits published by the Minotaur imprint at St. Martin's Press, under the auspices of editor Toni Plummer.
Brad now lives in Virginia, where he has completed the third and fourth installments of the Carter Ross series, coming soon to a bookshelf near you.
