Brian Stewart is a respected professional man, liked by his colleagues and friends and loved by his wife Marcia and their two young children. He has never been the kind of man who would lose his sense of propriety or do anything on an impulse.

Until, that is, the day he starts to go off the rails. Alarmed at the change in her husband, Marcia is horrified to discover that he has incurred tens of thousands of pounds in debts after starting to gamble compulsively. Soon afterwards, he is arrested for alleged sexual offences, including rape. Marcia stands by Brian but is unable to understand or explain this profound change in her husband’s behaviour. Surely, he is not in his right mind. But what sort of affliction could lead to such serious loss of control over his basic impulses?

Author Jeremy Bending spent his life as a hospital doctor and consultant physician. During that time he wrote fiction and short stories, some of which were brought together in his book A Listening Doctor, published in 2018. Following a life-long passion for writing, after hanging up his stethoscope he embarked on a new career as a writer of fiction.

His first novel, In the Shadows of the Birch Trees, published in 2020, tells the story of a young Hungarian woman and her baby, following their escape from entering the Birkenau concentration camp in WW2.

If You Don’t Know…, his second novel, was published in 2023, and was chosen as a finalist in the International Page Turner Writing Awards 2022. This complex thriller unravels the events surrounding the death of a diplomat, who is murdered by a Hungarian gang he uncovers trafficking Roma girls into the sex trade.