Brothers-in-law Harry and Jack run a Johannesburg furniture business that is being robbed repeatedly. The business regularly endures armed robberies, defaulting creditors, and a range of ingenious thievery schemes. The investigation of the crime also reveals that the perpetrators lie even closer than the proprietors expected.
David Cohen brilliantly uses this one store - and its owners, customers, staff, thieves and swindlers - as a microcosm of the greater problem, exploring how the social forces at work in South Africa today have made crime the country's biggest growth industry. Harry and Jack welcome the new democracy but must deploy all their humour, cunning, and salesmen's instincts to counter the criminals who threaten their business and sometimes their lives.
Written on the tenth anniversary of the fall of apartheid, 'People Who Have Stolen From Me' describes a nation in the throes of rebuilding itself, through the eyes of two witty, perceptive men.
