What Mom & Dad Never Told Us
by Mic Lowther
Olympus Story House


"What if she didn’t really die from the crash but from someone who caused it? No personal belongings found in the car means her purse was missing."

This final book in the Moorhouse Trilogy finds the siblings—Caroline, David, and Juliana—trying to decide what to do with the millions left to them by their father and the money they have made from their own business that he prompted them to start. Going through items left by their parents, they discover things that seem strange. Their father, the aloof lawyer and financial wizard, left behind a manuscript of modern fairy tales no one knew he had written. Their mother, who has been dead for about forty years, has an art museum named after her maiden name, which houses many of her paintings. In addition, she had a secret job as a night courier and kept a journal about it. This brings up questions about her death. In addition, life in the present keeps the siblings busy. A large company is offering a substantial amount of money to buy their business. The girls decide to go on a road trip to sell their mother's designer dresses, and the three are working on the idea of creating an in-house and online gambling business based on the game of Monopoly. With mysteries to solve and business to conduct, the siblings will not need to worry about what to do with their free time.

Part of what Lowther does in this book is to add a bit of a cold-case murder to the mix, a little like what Lou Berny does in The Long and Faraway Gone or Mary Higgins Clark in I’ve Got You Under My Skin. In searching for information about their mother, they find that she was writing in her journal about being followed while working as a night courier. Also, they realize that the report from the car accident notes that there is damage to the rear bumper of the car, and yet it was presumed she somehow lost control and ran the car head-on into a building. In another way, Lowther has built his trilogy around several different characters, but the Moorhouse family is ever present. In this way, it could be seen to parallel intergenerational family stories like Marquez’s magnificent One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although Marquez’s book follows many more generations than Lowther's, both show how knowledge and secrets get passed down to future generations. The Moorhouse siblings grow from a diverse cast of characters primarily concerned with themselves into accomplished adults who work together and find a common interest in learning more about their parents, which would not have been an item of interest in their younger years.

Lowther’s writing shows the clear signs of an author who has practiced his craft and become proficient in writing clear sentences that work to achieve his intended goal. The siblings have grown throughout the trilogy and are better individuals due to this growth. Each of the books has multiple smaller narratives included, which bring in more characters and help appeal to a wider audience. Overall, Lowther’s professionalism is clear in his writing, and fans of his earlier works will find plenty more to enjoy in this book.

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