Just Your Average Corpse

The Girl Next Door [by] Brad Parks

New York; Minotaur Books [2012]

978-0-312-66768-9; $24.99

Veteran reporter Carter Ross is reading the obituaries from the Newark Eagle-Examiner, his own paper, which is almost due for its own obituary, when he discovers the name of Nancy Marino.  Nancy was a 42-year-old waitress, who also had one of the biggest paper routes in the area for the same paper. She was a shop steward for the Union.  Carter sees her as a perfect subject for a personal-interest story. 

He attends the wake.  Other attendees include the publisher of the newspaper, Gary Jackman, known to his employees as “Jackass,” a very properly-dressed man, who seems to be having a confrontation with a short chunky man with a hideous comb-over, and the Union’s  executive director, Jim McNabb, with whom Carter talks about Nancy. He also talks to Nancy’s sisters, one of whom shows him an article from the paper, which says Nancy was the victim of a hit-and-run, a fact not in her obituary.  One of the sisters claims it was not an accident.

Later his editor, and sometime girlfriend, Tina, orders him to the symphony with her.  There they see Jackman again, and he is being a real jackass – he is totally smashed, and knocks people around and culminates his bad behavior by vomiting on the people around him.  Carter gets a small spark of an idea:  perhaps it was Jackman who ran down Nancy…

Carter goes to check out the scene of the crime, having learned from the police that they couldn’t find anything.  He suspects that they didn’t interview one family, which a neighbor tells him are Mexican illegals.  He calls a Spanish-speaking reporter to translate for him, and learns that the wife and mother saw the whole thing – Nancy was intentionally run over by a black SUV.

In one of the funniest scenes in the book – Carter has a great sense of wise-cracking humor – Tina sends him and their intern Kevin Lunkford, nicknamed “Lunky,” to do a story about a bear running loose in the city.  They find the bear, and Carter is chased by it.  Worn out, he leaves Lunky to interview people and then write up the story.  The bear is up a tree when Carter leaves – it should be a piece of cake!

Carter does more detecting, finding out that one of the diners where Nancy had worked has a lovely young hostess, who is the daughter of the owner, whom Carter had seen at the wake with Jackman – the bad comb-over.  When he tries to ask questions of this man, he gets thrown out of the diner.  But he does have some information from the daughter and Nancy’s best friend, a waitress named Jen.  He learns something – but not enough, from the National Labor Relations Board representative who visited both McNabb and the diner owner.  And McNabb clues him into some of his thoughts that Jackman maybe really was the culprit, considering what they discussed at a bar together the night before Nancy died.

When Carter gets back to the Eagle-Examiner offices, he discovers he’s in hot water for leaving Lunky behind.  Sure, Lunky was writing the story.  The angry photographer shows Carter the only photograph he could get, which is of the bear, but Lunky is carrying it – Carter is amazed.  It’s a two hundred-pound bear, but then Lunky was a linebacker once.  The story is even worse – Lunky is writing a treatise on bears in literature, not a news report, and he named the bear Ben after his favorite childhood book, Gentle Ben.

Carter saves Lunky’s story, but he goes off the rails trying to find out where Jackman was the night before Nancy’s death, making himself seem questionable to Jackman’s fleet of secretaries, which gets him suspended from the paper.  To celebrate, he goes to Jackman’s house to see if there’s a black SUV in the garage.  He looks through a cat door, and gets his head stuck, which gets him discovered by the Jackmans, who have him arrested.

After he gets out of jail, he nearly gets himself and the daughter of the diner owner killed by the same hit-and-run SUV.  Things go very fast after that, and he learns that his whole idea of the murder is wrong, very wrong.  The motive is wrong.  The culprit is wrong.  And he’s going to die because he was wrong.  But, with the help of his friends – the Spanish-speaking reporter, Editor Tina, members of his baseball team, and, especially Lunky, he is rescued and the mystery is solved.

Carter is a fresh new voice in the annals of amateur sleuths, with a fine sense of both the funny and the ethical, with a really good dollop of iconoclasm.  This is the third book in the series, and, hopefully there will be many more.  Go get ‘em, Carter!  You, too, Brad! Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a library book.