David Scott Strain

The GRIM GRIND of LIFE David Scott Strain

Meet Jack Trey: Jazz hipster, Blues purist, and cynical Private Investigator on a brand-new case. For his client, divorced industrialist Phillip Ford, it's a problem with his teen runaway daughter, Carol. Mr. Ford's got custody only in the technical sense: And, it's only her latest disappearance. But this one has lasted long enough to inspire Ford's hire of a pro. It's all stuff Mr. Trey's seen and handled before in the back pages of a deep casebook - as Trey finds himself in the part of a city that is both despair and de rigueur with a PI's grind through life. But suddenly, with increasingly strange and ever-more dangerous bounces, none of it is routine. He's hitting dead-ends and danger of an entirely different sort. He's juggled leads and liars in the past, from cop to client, and every type in-between. For the best of the pros, past cases inevitably build a pile: Murders, injuries, injustice, guns, knives, police involvement, police abuse, lies, malevolence, betrayal, escalating demands... but this time a twist so bizarre and unexpected that for Mr. Trey... well, it turns out he hasn't seen everything after all. Here, the reader comes to care, until the turn of each page becomes a necessity. Jack Trey's somewhat jaundiced view of life, his dry humor, and his acerbic observations in exercising Life overall somehow manage to grant readers their own, simpatico, "I've been there" kind of relationship to Trey - regardless of any individual reader's identity.