Choose Your Parents Wisely
(Brighton's No.1 Private Detective #2)
by Tom Trott
One missing girl and the whole city goes crazy.
It’s been three days, and now everyone in Brighton is looking for her. There is an army of police searching, her picture is on every front page, and the public can’t get enough of it. Gangs of good citizens are going door to door, turning their neighbors’ houses upside down, but still, no one can find her.
For Brighton’s No.1 Private Detective, Joe Grabarz, it brings back too many memories of his first case, another missing girl, when he learned too many lessons the hard way. No one was going door to door then. No one cared. But her mum and dad weren't nearly as photogenic, nor quite so saintly.
It’s a lesson Joe learned long ago that has come back to haunt him: choose your parents wisely.
My Rating:
Despite being only fifty-something she had the coiffured helmet of hair you expect to see on a pensioner. Hairsprayed to the point where it could be removed in one piece and swapped for something different. Except that it couldn’t, of course, because if it could there was no way you would choose that one. I could see why her husband had left her, I couldn’t live with that hair either.
I had broken my oath to stay calm. In fact I had probably broken a record for the fastest broken oath in history. But that was just a practice run. From now on. Again: I will stay calm.
I’ve always known there was something wrong with me. They say the secret ingredient when making a baby is love. I’m what you get when you leave it out.
This was a place where in twilight elves lurked and fairies larked. But right now, rich people were lurking and larking instead.
My Review:
Thomas Trott has provided another compelling and clever read which was a bit dark, twisted, and complicated, while also smartly crafted, quickly paced, and cunningly plotted. Choose Your Parents Wisely involved three mysteries and two timelines. The timelines narrated his first and most recent cases, each with missing children, and were despairingly similar. The third mystery involved his questionable parentage, which I was never quite certain if the background info was accurate or a possible shakedown. The two timelines were not clearly delineated, nor were they always easily differentiated, which was occasionally frustrating but I was up for the challenge as I adore Mr. Trott’s stylized writing, oddly compelling characters, sardonic humor, and the stealthily placed levity he deftly laced among the tense and dangerous situations our tarnished hero, Joe Grabarz, found himself in. I am enamored with Joe; he appears to be a tried and true smart ass, yet he has a soft heart. Joe would quickly agree to my first observation but would hotly deny the later. I adored his witty banter and snarky quips; even his meaningless conversations often appeared to be amusingly combative. Lucky me, I have one more grand adventure ahead with the enigmatic shamus as I have the newest installment, It Never Goes Away, patiently idling on my new Kindle.
Empress DJ
Born in Brighton, I went to school in here, worked many jobs here, and have never lived anywhere else. I first started writing at school, where I and a group of friends devised and performed comedy plays for assemblies, much to the amusement of our fellow pupils. The young ones would cheer (and the old ones would groan) as we stepped up onto the stage, the buzz was tangible. It has been with me ever since.
As an adult I have written a short comedy play that was performed at the Theatre Royal Brighton in May 2014 as part of the Brighton Festival; Daye's Work, a television pilot for the local Brighton channel; and won the Empire Award (thriller category) in the 2015 New York Screenplay Contest. I published my first novel, You Can't Make Old Friends, in 2016; my second, Choose Your Parents Wisely, in 2017, my third, The Benevolent Dictator, in 2018, and now my fourth, It Never Goes Away, in 2019. When I’m not writing books, I’m writing about writing, books, and film on Medium.
My inspirations as a writer come from a diverse range of storytellers, but I have a particular love for the works of Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Joel & Ethan Coen, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Bryan Fuller, Ira Levin, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Towne, JRR Tolkien, and many many more books and films beside. If you can't find me, or I'm not answering my phone, I'm probably at the cinema.
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