Faces of the Gone

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Four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot: That’s the front-page news facing Carter Ross, investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle-Examiner. Immediately dispatched to the scene, Carter 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. The police, eager to calm jittery residents, leak a theory that the murders are revenge for a bar stickup, and Carter’s paper, hungry for a scoop, hastily prints it. Carter doesn’t come from the streets, but he understands a thing or two about Newark’s neighborhoods. And he knows there are no quick answers when dealing with a crime like this. Determined to uncover the true story, he enlists the aide of Tina Thompson, the paper’s smoking-hot city editor, to run interference at the office; Tommy Hernandez, the paper’s gay Cuban intern, to help him with legwork on the streets; and Tynesha Dales, a local stripper, to take him to Newark’s underside. It turns out that the four victims have one connection after all, and this knowledge will put Carter on the path of one very ambitious killer.Faces of the Gone won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel and the Nero Award for Best American Mystery--it is the first book to receive both awards. The book was named to lists of the year's best mystery debuts by the Chicago Sun-Times and South Florida Sun-Sentinel. From Publishers WeeklyParks's entertaining debut introduces an appealing hero, 31-year-old investigative reporter Carter Ross of the Newark (N.J.) Eagle-Examiner. When the bodies of four men, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, turn up in a vacant lot, Ross doesn't buy the police theory that the quadruple homicide was the result of a bar robbery gone bad. Despite his white upper-class background, Ross works the streets well, if not fearlessly, in his search for a link among the victims. Parks ratchets up the tension by occasionally interjecting the viewpoint of the Director, who orchestrated the slayings. Colorful supporting characters plus Ross's grit and determination keep the story moving at a good clip. Parks, a former print journalist himself, knows his way around a newsroom as the laments for the newspaper industry and the digs at TV reporters attest. Readers are likely to figure out the shadowy Director's identity before the intrepid reporter, but this is a quibble. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistThe murder of a single drug dealer in Newark, New Jersey, barely registers as news; but four bodies, shot execution style in a weedy Newark vacant lot, even attracts the New York media. Carter Ross, investigative reporter for the Newark Eagle-Examiner, begins to pound the pavement, uncovering information that even the cops haven’t found. Then Carter’s modest bungalow in a Newark suburb is bombed, and Carter himself becomes the primary target of the Director, a megalomaniac drug kingpin. Faces of the Gone is an engaging but uneven debut novel by a former reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. Parks’ writing is graceful and often gripping, and he creates a handful of vivid characters, both journalists and their sources. His portraits of the city and its drug trade, the newspaper, and Carter’s journalistic techniques all sound knowing, though it’s odd that he chose to invent a new federal agency, the National Drug Bureau. Plotting remains something of a problem; his red herrings, in particular, have passed their sell-by date. Still, this could develop into a solid series. --Thomas Gaughan