Love and loss behind Andrew’s thriller-tale of a day in Paris
Andrew Brel is a creative chameleon… a musician, an LA session man and a music producer.
He is also a travelling man and a campaigner against draconian family laws.
But Andrew is also a purveyor of fiction and a consummate narrator.
And it is these two talents we are focussing on.
Yep, like us all Andrew is old enough to have been through the milling machines, and like most of us, he has been left battered, bloodied, stark-bollock naked, broke and cheated by love and law.
All this comes out in his lightly accented voice and in his writing in a new audio book, One Day in Paris.
His experiences give cadence and depth to his tale of adventure, politics, love and deceit.
Originally from South Africa, Andrew washed up in LA after building – then helping to demolish – a family and a life in the heady musical thump of 80s and 90s London.
Yep, he lost so many things, a partner, his Thame-side home and contact with his little boy.
Licking his wounds Andrew fled to Tinseltown.
Since then he has privately published e-books, a number on the heartbreak of PA, a syndrome where the parent with ‘custody’ deliberately turns a child against the parent forced to hit the road.
But here, in his novel (hear it on Audible) Andrew is living in another world, under another name.
Yet you can still feel the rush and reality of our man’s emotion and confusion.
Andrew’s is a book sitting somewhere between Mettle of Woomara, Heart of the Hunter and Killing Eve.
One Day in Paris focuses on a year in the life of Dan Blake.
Blake’s career in the British Army comes to an end because of a psychiatric evaluation.
Divorced and jobless, a chance meeting in Moscow with an oil billionaire leads to an opportunity to earn again. But Blake has to go up against the world’s leading security agencies.
Failure means death.
Success though means membership of a secret super elite.
It’s not a world-changing concept, but a good read – or listen – is exactly what One Night in Paris is.