Parks comes by his character's background naturally, describing himself as "an escaped journalist. Or a reformed journalist. Or a journalist refugee." He started out at the age of 14 as a sportswriter for his local paper "because it paid better than babysitting and gave me unfettered access to the Ridgefield High School girls basketball team." He continued sports writing through high school and college, then interned at the Washington Post. He later moved to the Newark Star-Ledger to cover pro sports. He decided he always wanted to be a novelist--and since only a blind man could miss that the newspaper industry was starting to die--quit his job and started cranking out manuscripts.

Parks notes that journalism was an excellent training ground for novel-writing because it honed his writing muscles and forced him into close proximity to fantastic source material. "It's been said that journalists spend their life observing emotional extremes--I'm usually either seeing a person on one of the best days of their lives or one of the worst days of their lives. Good genre fiction lives on those extremes, too."

The idea for Faces of the Gone came from a real story Parks covered when he was writing for the Star-Ledger, covering the investigation of a quadruple homicide. "I can still remember looking around at this desolate place, with its waist-high weeds, wind-blown litter and stray police tape, wondering: How did four people come to die in this spot?" He found the real-life mystery to be somewhat unsatisfactory, because, unlike fiction (or the sports stories he was writing), it didn't seem to have a solution. So, in his fictional world, he created one.

Although Parks reluctantly admits he didn't do a shred of research for the book, "It was all stuff I had written about for the newspaper or had seen first-hand in my reporting. So there's a great deal of authenticity to the book because most everything in there is taken from a real-life experience and then twisted just slightly into fiction."

Parks lives in Virginia with his wife and two children and writes full time, loves to sing and do community theater. He's also an "unrepentant washed-up jock. I run, I do open-water distance swimming, I play softball, tennis, and golf." When not doing that, he's working on yet another thriller featuring Carter Ross.

Mark Terry is the author of the Derek Stillwater thriller series. His newest thriller, THE SERPENT'S KISS, is available in stores and online.