Mortimer, John. Quite honestly. New York: Viking, 2005. ISBN 0-670-83483-5.

Summary: A well-intentioned but naive young woman joins a volunteer organization that helps convicts find housing and jobs when they leave prison. She immediately falls in love with her first case, a small-time burglar, young, handsome, and occasionally charming. She is unable to induce him to give up a life of crime, and eventually her desire to understand the excitement that burglary holds for him leads her to commit a series of thefts, gradually increasing in scale. At the same time, however, he gradually loses enthusiasm for his chosen profession, eventually deciding that his burglaries are pedestrian and pointless. Moving thus in opposite directions, they have some difficulty finding the right common ground on which to base their relationship.

As in Mortimer's Rumpole stories, part of the charm of this novel is the contrast between Mortimer's sympathetic treatment of the characters as people and the skeptical cynicism he applies to the institutions within which they function. He burdens the organization that works with convicts with a silly, pretentious name (“SCRAP: Social Carers, Reformers and Praeceptors”) and equips it with a sappy philosophy to justify its meddling. On the other hand, he portrays the leader of the criminal gang to which the burglar belongs as a yuppie, preoccupied with his plans for upward mobility and tending to regard the gang members who actually commit the burglaries as his employees and underlings. It is difficult to decide which of the two groups it would be less pleasant to join.