There is a lot going on in his life that thirteen-year-old Tony Miglione does not really understand--like why his parents suddenly have money enough to buy a house on Long Island, why his mother has changed, why his rich friend Joel shoplifts, why he is obsessed with Joel's sixteen-year-old sister, and why he is having terrible stomach pains.

In 1920s London, pickpocket Alice Diamond scrambles to survive in her gritty neighborhood. With her father in prison and her brother in debt to a crime syndicate, she struggles to protect her father's territory. Recruited by Mary Carr, Alice joins a female gang, the Forty Elephants, and tastes success. But it's not long before she wants more--no matter the cost.

Between school and Al-Anon meetings, Jenna helps Mrs. Gladstone cope with escalating problems that result from the merger of Gladstone Shoes with Shoe Warehouse Corporation, while managing a new employee with a shoplifting record.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caregiver in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime,...

Sandy is drawn unknowingly into a shoplifting incident, but when his community service involves baseball he meets people who help him finally put the past behind him.

Classy shoplifter Lee Leander, on trial for swiping a diamond bracelet, has her case postponed by Assistant District Attorney John Sargent until after Christmas. Taking pity on her, he bails her out of jail. He's driving home to Indiana for the holidays, and when he finds Lee's a Hoosier too, offers to drop her at her mother's on the way. When she's rejected by her mother, he brings her home to his place where his mother, his aunt and their farmhand,...

When Buster impulsively drops a Cybertoy into Arthur's backpack in the drugstore one day, he feels so guilty that he finally confesses to his friend and they try to return the popular toy before anyone else finds out.

After being caught shoplifting, eleven-year-old Al feels humiliated and tries to recapture his self-respect.