Quite Honestly - a hilarious crime novel by bestselling Rumpole author John Mortimer

Life couldn’t be better for Lucinda Purefoy. She’s got a steady boyfriend, a degree in social sciences and the offer of a job in advertising. With all this, she felt she should ‘pay back her debt to society’ and ‘do a little good in the world’.

That’s why she joined SCRAP (short for ‘Social Carers, Reformers and Preceptors’), an organization which trains girls like Lucy to become the ‘guide, philosopher and friend’ to ex-convicts coming out of prison, to find them a job, a home and to encourage them to kick the habit of stealing things.

And so Lucy finds herself standing outside the gates of Wormwood Scrubs, on a windy March morning, waiting to greet her first SCRAP ‘client’, a career-burglar called Terry Keegan. What happens next confounds expectations and produces a story full of surprises.

With a cast of characters that rivals anything in his famous Rumpole stories and a compulsive plot, Quite Honestly is a wonderfully comic novel. If you like to read P.D. James and P.G. Wodehouse, you will love this book.
Sir John Mortimer was a barrister, playwright and novelist. His fictional political trilogy of Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets has recently been republished in Penguin Classics, together with Clinging to the Wreckage and his play A Voyage round My Father. His most famous creation was the barrister Horace Rumpole, who featured in four novels and around eighty short stories. His books in Penguin include: The Anti-social Behaviour of Horace Rumpole; The Collected Stories of Rumpole; The First Rumpole Omnibus; Rumpole and the Angel of Death; Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders; Rumpole and the Primrose Path; Rumpole and the Reign of Terror; Rumpole and the Younger Generation; Rumpole at Christmas; Rumpole Rests His Case; The Second Rumpole Omnibus; Forever Rumpole; In Other Words; Quite Honestly and Summer’s Lease.