Review: Stakeouts and Strollers

Stakeouts and Strollers by Rob Phillips

Fiction, Mystery (not cozy)

4****

THOUGHTS: This was a different type of mystery. It’s a little more hard core than a regular cozy, but not as hard as James Patterson or Michael Connelly. Charlie is a brand new PI (thanks to a little fancy paperwork by his boss) who is obsessed with his new baby daughter, which leads to a dead battery on his phone and missing the money pictures of the cheating woman he’s supposed to be following. But when he meets a young (16 yr old) girl who seems to be in trouble while on his stakeout, he knows he has to help her. Unfortunately, helping her leads to all sorts of other problems, including threats to his own family and he can’t have that. The answer is to solve the problems, even when they become dangerous not just for him, but his boss, his cop friend, the girl…and his family.

I loved Charlie. He’s so incredibly inept when it comes to surveillance, which is a surprise since he used to be an award-winning crime reporter for the paper. He adores his family, and, by extension, the young girl. The settings are well-done and the reasons behind the bad guys being who they are twisted, but believable. And there’s a satisfying ending (with a dangling thread that lets us know there will be more).

Recommended.

BLURB: Charlie Shaw is low on sleep. And cash. Otherwise, life is going pretty well for the ex-crime he’s happily married to his college sweetheart, he’s a first-time dad to the most adorable baby girl in existence, and he’s making ends meet as a rookie PI. But when Charlie meets Friday Finley, a frightened sixteen-year-old runaway on a stakeout-gone-wrong, his world gets a little more complicated. Friday is looking for her estranged father Shawn, an unreliable alcoholic who left when she was young—and who also happens to be her only shot at avoiding the foster care system since her mother’s death a few weeks earlier. At first, Charlie believes the man is simply hiding out somewhere, avoiding his responsibilities as usual, but the more he investigates, the more unsettling—and dangerous—Shawn’s disappearance becomes. When his own family is threatened, Charlie realizes he’s in over his head, but can he back out now that he’s begun to care for Friday as his own? A perfect page-turning blend of humor and high stakes, Stakeouts and Strollers is a heartwarming story of fatherhood, family, and what it really means to be a “Girl Dad.”