Newspapers may be in deep trouble, but good crime novels about them seem to be on a roll. New York Times vet John Darnton's Black and White and Dead All Over told us about the bitchy, nasty things that go on at a New York paper of record. In The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly showed what happens when a top Los Angeles Times writer is given the sack -- and is then asked to train his successor.
Following in that same quality vein is the just published FACES OF THE GONE, a debut mystery by New Jersey's own Brad Parks, who knows the turf as well as Harlen Coben. His Carter Ross is an investigative reporter for the (fictional) Newark Eagle-Examiner. When four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, are found stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot, Ross learns that the four victims -- an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler and a mama’s boy -- came from different parts of the city and didn’t seem to know one another.
How Carter turns from investigative reporter to crime-solver makes for a lively, intelligent read. And for people like me who spent lots of years in lots of newsrooms, it's the perfect cure for the news today that Editor & Publisher, where I used to scan the classifieds and imagine myself working in exotic places like Seattle or Singapore, is folding after 130 years...
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