Insurable Interest (Revised Edition)

Sometimes when all is well, life has a nasty habit of jumping up and kicking one in a painful part of one's anatomy. The comfort and familiarity of the commonplace gives way to other imperatives and things are never quite the same again. Like a blind man in a dark room, looking for a black hat which is not there, Carnegie Browne began the pointless quest for his lost career. Sidelined in his early forties from his high flying financial services job, he also faces the prospect of divorce and estrangement from his children. Alas it never rains but what it pours and his desperate efforts to extract himself from increasing personal debt end predictably in new failure. It is in times like this that many men find their true selves and some men find God. But the devil too is near to those in despair and may manifest himself in the form of sinister ideas which dance across the pale canvass of the psyche. It is to one of these ideas that Browne allies himself and embraces catastrophe as a constant companion. Every action in our lives has a similar reaction and others in this story should remember that if something seems too good to be true then it usually is. But no man is beyond redemption and even the thief on the cross had his advocate. What man may destroy, man may recreate if he has a will. By our fruits shall we be known and by our actions are we judged.