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Bio (Brief 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." The book launched the career of Brad's fictional investigative reporter Carter Ross, who readers voted "The World's Favorite Amateur Sleuth" in a 64 sleuth, tournament-style bracket, beating out Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in the finals. Carter has since appeared in Eyes of the Innocent (Feb. 2011), which Library Journal called "as good if not better (than) his acclaimed debut." The third Carter Ross adventure, The Girl Next Door, is due out March 13, 2012. 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brad Parks 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 the girls' basketball players at Ridgefield High, that meant glowing accounts of their daughters' games that ran on for no less than 40 inches. This launched Brad on a 20-year journalism career, one that continued at Dartmouth College—where he founded a weekly sports newspaper—and included stops at The Washington Post and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger. A sportswriter who later switched to news, he covered everything from the Super Bowl to the Masters, from small-town pizza wars to Hurricane Katrina. His work was recognized by, among others, the Associated Press Sports Editors, the National Headliner Awards, the National Association of Black Journalists and the New Jersey Press Association, which gave its top award for enterprise reporting to Brad's 40-year retrospective on the Newark riots. 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. Brad left the newspaper industry in 2008 to become a full-time author/stay-at-home Dad to two young children. He and his wife, Melissa, now live in Virginia, where he is currently working on the next of what he hopes will be many Carter Ross Mysteries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  |
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