In Another Life

Sheldon Roberts is a retired hedge fund manager, an emotionally wealthy man of 70 who is dying. Despite his professional success, his two marriages have failed and his son Michael does not speak to him. Roberts knows that money alone will not win back his son's love, so he leaves him a manuscript and asks him to read it.
It is the memoir of Robert (Robbie) Costa, a man his son never heard of. But Michael will soon learn that until the age of seventeen, his father was Robert Costa-that he grew up in a family of professional thieves-gypsies who travelled from city to city to stay ahead of the sheriff, the landlord, and their angry marks.
The memoir starts in 1948 when Robbie is 10 years old, and it tells a story of his growing disillusionment with his family and the only kind of life that they can offer him. During the second half of the book, Robbie decides at the age of seventeen to break with his family and become another person. By using the criminal skills that he has learned from his relatives, he executes a caper that will set him free and give him another life with a new name.