Carter Ross

Four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot: That's the front-page news facing Carter Ross, investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle-Examiner. Immediately dispatched to the scene, Carter learns that the four victims - an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler, and a mama's boy - came from different parts of the city and didn't seem to know one another.

Carter Ross, the sometimes-dashing investigative reporter for the Newark Eagle-Examiner, is back, and reporting on the latest tragedy to befall Newark, New Jersey: a fast-moving house fire that kills two boys. With the help of the papers newest intern, a bubbly blonde known as Sweet Thang, Carter finds the victims mother, Akilah Harris, who spins a tale of woe about a mortgage rate reset that forced her to work two jobs and leave her young boys without child care. But she's not what she seems....

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. Struck by the opportunity to write a heroic piece about an everyday woman killed too young, he heads to her wake to gather tributes and anecdotes. It’s the last place Ross expects to find controversy - which is exactly what happens when one of Nancy’s sisters convinces him that the accident might not have been accidental at all.

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. And then he gets another call from his boss: the story's off, the cop committed suicide.

When he hears residents of a Newark neighborhood are getting sick - and even dying - from a strange disease, investigative reporter Carter Ross dives into the story - so deep he comes down with the illness himself. With even more motivation to track down the source of the disease, Carter soon hits upon a nearby construction site.

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.