Stepping out of the movie theatre into the vast, nearly empty, scantily lit parking lot, it is immediately clear to Anna and Pete that her car is gone. If they had stuck out the traffic after the Bourne Bridge coming back from Cape Cod, the Toyota Supra would be safely parked outside Pete’s Massachusetts Avenue top floor apartment. Or maybe not, it wasn’t exactly the safest end of that 16 mile thoroughfare that serves the greater Boston area. It’s probably a miracle it hasn’t been stollen before. It wouldn’t be long before it was stollen again.

As Anna and her table companions talk animatedly over an umpteenth round of sour apple martinis, her attention moves towards the door. She’s not sure she is seeing correctly. It looks to her like a young teenager is twirling a gun around his finger as he enters the Hard Rock Café in Illovo, a suburb of Johannesburg. It’s Boxing Day 1999, five days before the Millenium and the pending fear of Y2K. It turns out it is a gun and the young man’s friend, following closely behind, has one too.

Anna’s young sons smile excitedly when they see the top of her head as she ascends the staircase of their Cape Town home. “Mom! That man was so nice!” “What man?” She replies. “The man who fixes toilets. He fixed yours after he shut your door to keep the bad smell away from us.” The problem is, there was nothing wrong with Anna’s toilet and no repair man had been called. The boys were home “sick” from school that day and playing on their iPads in the upstairs family lounge which sits next to Anna’s bedroom. Anna, having just returned from a meeting in town, rushes into her bedroom to find all her valuables gone.

In these and other short stories, Anna revisits the events surrounding crimes that took place around her and to her in the various countries she called home. Told with much humour mixed with a dash of nostalgia these somewhat unbelievable stories will keep you wanting more.