If Tomorrow Comes

If Tomorrow Comes is a crime novel by the American writer Sidney Sheldon, published in 1985. It was adapted as a three-part television serial the following year.

The book is the story of a woman who is destroyed by people with more power than she has and who then spends the rest of the novel making herself into somebody they cannot reach. Tracy Whitney begins it as an idealistic bank manager with a fiance and a career, and she is left with a prison record and nothing else. She is sentenced to fifteen years, and the novel is explicit about what happens to her inside.

What follows is her education. The novel takes her from the United States to Europe and through a series of cities, and the second half of the book is about the trade she learns and the people she meets in it, including a fellow practitioner of the same skills whose interests and hers keep crossing. Sheldon wrote it as a story of revenge, and the pleasure of the book is in the detail of how the schemes work.