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The initial volume, Aya, released in 2007, focuses on three teenage girlfriends-Aya, Bintou and Adjoua-growing up in Yop City, a working-class neighborhood of Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. Like the Botswana mysteries of Alexander McCall Smith, the Aya books celebrate the everyday, realistic joys of African life, and though the super-rich and super-poor find themselves uncomfortably thrown together, the politics are always human ones. Marilyn Dahl, book review editor, Shelf AwarenessĪt the highest watermark of graphic novels, only Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home share space with the gorgeous and deliciously fun Aya chronicles from Drawn and Quarterly, written by Marguerite Abouet and illustrated by Clément Oubrerie. So it's just a question of transcribing the interesting things they say when they start yapping." Adam Verner, who did the audio version (Dreamscape Media), told Parks he thought Uncle Bernie was quite possibly the most fun he'd ever had narrating a character. Parks said, "My characters are real people who just happen to live in my head (there's a lot of room up there). In The Good Cop, Uncle Bernie and Gene are a particular riot. Parks's previous book, The Girl Next Door, was just nominated for the Lefty Award for the best humorous mystery of the year.

It took four books for me to realize a novelist is allowed to do that." This book deals with a real issue, but the story is invented. "The first three books are based on stories I covered, and I wrote them like everything had to be double-sourced. Parks added that, in a way, this is his first novel-as a career journalist, he had it seared into his soul not to make up stuff. It doesn't take much effort to buy a trunk-load of guns, file off serial numbers and drive up north-I-95 is called 'the iron pipeline'-to sell them." But I didn't understand how loose they were elsewhere until I moved south. I always knew those guns didn't come from New Jersey-gun control laws there are too strict. "As a reporter in Newark, I covered the devastation caused by illegal guns for years. The Good Cop deals with the illegal gun trade between Virginia and New Jersey. His novels cover serious issues-drugs, house flipping and political corruption. Brad Parks's fourth novel featuring New Jersey reporter Carter Ross, The Good Cop, has just been published by Minotaur and, as expected, is more than fine. A delight for mystery lovers is discovering a good writer with a good series.