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A Fair Hope: My Family's Love and Loss Biography-Autobiography, Fiction ©2026 M.R.M. Parrott First Published: Oct 2026 Published by rimric press 0-9746106-9-0 | 978-0-9746106-9-6 344 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025 2025 Edition Extras: Appendices of Reference Materials, Notes on the Cover Art Amazon Paperback (author) Barnes & Noble Paperback (author) Waterstones Paperback (author)

RIMRIC / CHARLESTON, SC (12 September, 2026) - Tommy Ray Martin, 31, was brutally killed by a hit and run driver while walking outside the First Baptist Church in Fairhope Alabama. It was just after midnight on July 12, and Martin was on his way home from leading a church hayride. That was 58 years ago. Now, Tommy's son Mark, the writer and philosopher M.R.M. Parrott, has reconstructed the mystery of what happened in a new book about his father, mother, sister, and step-father. A Fair Hope: My Family's Love and Loss is a blend of non-fiction, memoir, and fiction, telling the story of the author's family history, the tragic death of his father, how their lives developed afterward, and how different things might well have been had his father not been killed.

The driver who hit Tommy Ray Martin, Cecil Daniel Taylor, 20, was speeding and spinning out at approximately fifty miles per hour from South Section Street onto Nichols Avenue, where Martin was walking when the driver lost control of the car. Charged with felony manslaughter, Taylor was only convicted of felony leaving the scene and fined $500. M.R.M. Parrott has written an introspective analysis in A Fair Hope about what must have happened to his father that night, as Parrott, 21 months old, and his mother, 33, were sleeping in the family house less than a mile away, and as his mother was then unknowingly pregnant with his sister. No one in the family or Fairhope community seemed to know what happened in any detail.

“The book is a great love letter to each of my immediate family,” Parrott says. “Our lives were irrevocably changed for the worse that night. This book is an attempt to understand what happened and forgive my father for going away. It is also about our family origins, and includes a fictional version of our lives the way they should have been lived.” His twentieth book, A Fair Hope is Parrott's most deeply personal and emotional work to date, and comes after Parrott experienced the loss of his mother and sister, seven weeks apart, in the Spring of 2023. “The book is also about my family's Religion and my Atheism, each affected by the tragedy.” A Fair Hope is available in paperback and ebook.

M.R.M. Parrott's books include the novel trilogy “Timeless”, Philosophy and Science series “Dynamism”, novella “To Lie Within the Moment”, travelogue “Driving Home”, cookbook “The Intuitive Chef”, stage play “Ctrl-V”, music album “Intersections”, philosophical interviews “Synthetic A Priori”, monographs in Philosophy, and chapbooks of poems and short stories. His design and programming includes rimric.com, mrmparrott.com, and GetWiki.net, and numerous dynamic websites and print media for clients. Visit mrmparrott.com or rimric.com for more information.

A Fair Hope: My Family's Love and Loss Biography-Autobiography, Fiction ©2026 M.R.M. Parrott First Published: Oct 2026 Published by rimric press 0-9746106-9-0 | 978-0-9746106-9-6 344 Pages, Paperback & eBook, 2025 2025 Edition Extras: Appendices of Reference Materials, Notes on the Cover Art Amazon Paperback (author) Barnes & Noble Paperback (author) Waterstones Paperback (author)