The fraud

★ ★ ★ 1/2
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
—

The ethical dilemma posited aside, I hated the first chapter. If I'd never read a Brad Parks book before, it might have caused me to move on to the next thing on my reading list. The cheap “in 43 hours, X, Y, and Z are going to happen...” ploy irritates me. Just get me invested with setting, plot, or character. Present one or all of these in an interesting manner and I'll get invested. Don't force the investment. Don't jam it down my throat. Also, there was a perfect point 300 or so pages later that it would've fit.

Thankfully, Chapter 2 was much better, as was the rest of the book. This was the typical Parks mix of darkness and light, grim stories told with a light touch. A newspaper reporter trying to live up to the tradition of the great investigative journalists of the past in the midst of an industry that's dying and doesn't care about that tradition.

Carter seems to be off his game a little here, making a couple of blunders that seem out of character – but given that he spends the whole novel waiting for That Call from his pregnant girlfriend, it's understandable. It also helps move the novel along nicely, so, it's easier to swallow (especially while reading).

There's a string of carjackings in Newark, and a couple have proved deadly. Naturally, the one that makes people pay attention is a well-off middle-aged white man. Carter just can't write about him though, he seeks out another carjacking that resulted in a murder, this time of a less well-off black man. It doesn't take long before Carter's sure it was the same carjackers, and that there's something else going on besides Grand Theft Auto.

There's not much (beyond the strange relationship between Carter and Tina) that really seems to be the same from novel to novel in this series. The cases don't overlap really, which is refreshing. Carter can't rely on the same sources of information all the time – which doesn't preclude some returning supporting characters, but also keeps things fresh on that front. The corner bodega shop owner in The Fraud was entertaining, and I hope we see him again down the line. Other characters here – friends and family of the victims, sources of information, and so on – were well-drawn and engaging as usual.

Easily one of the more entertaining aspects of the Carter Ross books are the interns – from savvy to naive, hapless to ruthlessly efficient, these characters make you fear for the state of journalism (or give you great hope). This books' intern, Chillax, annoyed me greatly in the first couple of pages we spent with him. He clearly rubbed Carter the wrong way, too. Which did provide a grin or three. Case in point, we first meet him like this:

“Hey, what's up, brah?”

I am unsure what youthful genius decided that the word “bro”–which is already an effective truncation of the word “brother”–needed to be further morphed so it was pronounced like a woman's undergarment. But it was my hope this linguistic pioneer developed some affliction that was similarly annoying. Like a permanent hangnail.

Fletch

The Fraud