Synopses & Reviews
A keenly intelligent, delightfully mordant novel that blends fact and fiction with the same deft hand that was at work in John Darntons best-selling
Neanderthal.
Bad news is brewing in the inner sanctum of the New York Globe, the citys long-standing newspaper of note, whose back is to the wall. Readership, advertising, and circulation are plummeting—along with the papers vaunted standards—and the cost cutters have their knives out. But trouble of a wholly different kind begins one rainy September morning when a powerful editor is found murdered in the newsroom, with the spike that hed wielded to kill stories hammered into his chest. The problem for Priscilla Bollingsworth, the young, ambitious female NYPD detective assigned to the case—besides the fact that the mayor is breathing down her neck—is that there are too many suspects to choose from.
She teams up with Jude Hurley, a clever, rebellious reporter, and together they navigate the ink-infested waters whose denizens include the papers resentful old guard, scheming careerists, a bumbling publisher, a steely executive editor, and a rival newspaper tycoon named Lester Moloch. But the waters thicken considerably when more bodies turn up, dead all over.
Armed with the firsthand knowledge he has acquired through forty years in journalism, John Darnton conjures up the cynicism and romanticism of the profession and gives us a cunning, pitch-perfect portrait of the declining—if not yet murderous—newspaper industry. Black and White and Dead All Over is a satirical mystery that entertains from first to last.
Synopsis
From the author of the bestselling "Neanderthal" comes a cunning, pitch-perfect portrait of the declining--if not yet murderous--newspaper industry and a mystery that entertains from first to last. Darnton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for "The New York Times."
About the Author
John Darnton has worked for forty years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories that were smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law. He is a best-selling author whose previous novels include Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy. He lives in New York.