Central Skagit Library District

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.
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.

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As long as Newark Eagle-Examiner reporter Carter Ross turns in his stories on deadline, no one bats an eye if he doesn't wander into the newsroom until 10 or 11 in the morning. So it's an unpleasant surprise when he's awakened at 8:38 by a phone call from his boss, telling him a local policeman was killed and Carter will be covering the story, starting immediately. He's baffled when, hours later, there are still no other reporters at the widow's house....

In a rash of carjackings, Newark becomes newsworthy when one such theft ends in the murder of a wealthy banking executive. The affable, wisecracking Ross is assigned the story. To balance his reporting, he finds a Nigerian immigrant of more modest means who was also killed during a recent carjacking. It turns out the two victims knew each other, sharing an unexplained round of golf at a country club shortly before their deaths. When his unborn child...