The Reluctant Thief

A Novel by Alan Carmichael

What compels good people to do bad things? And how do they make right a world they have violated?

Tim Scott lives a comfortable professional life in London. He has a chance encounter with Sanjay Roy, a colleague from university days who works as the acceptable face of a semi-criminal organisation. The two of them share a macabre secret from the past which Tim has tried to erase from memory.

When Sanjay discovers that Tim's job provides him with high level access to his company's computer systems, he uses this secret to draw Tim into a plan to defraud the firm.

Tim is both attracted and appalled by the forbidden world which Sanjay enables him to glimpse. And as the moral and psychological foundations of his personal life are knocked out from underneath him one by one, he steps across into it ...

Weaving together the lives of financiers and prostitutes, of streetfighters and classical musicians, The Reluctant Thief examines how the worlds of crime and violence coexist in parallel with normal society. It explores the psychological forces which drive the people who inhabit these worlds, and the moral questions which they face, or choose to ignore.

The Reluctant Thief is the story of a journey to the dark side of the human psyche - and of the long road back.

The Reluctant Thief is available from Amazon (UK) (print version and eBook) and Amazon (USA). You can also order from bookshops.