You HAVE to trust the last engineer who looked at it. The usual pre-flight checks will only pick up obvious things, or obvious cases of malicious damage.
Most engineers are very good. On any airfield, the "monkeys" (if any) will be well known so if you are in charge of maintaining a plane, ask around first.
With club planes flown by many others, perhaps you have the extra assurance that if it is dodgy, somebody else is likely to get killed first!
Having said this, structural failures / control problems are extremely rare. If they weren't then I would never fly because something like that is a virtually certain death.