What Actually Happens in If Tomorrow Comes By Sidney Sheldon
Sidney Sheldon wrote a lot of page-turners, and If Tomorrow Comes is probably his most straightforward one. The basic setup involves Amanda King, who goes to prison for a crime she didn't commit, learns how to run cons while she's there, gets out, and systematically takes down the people who ruined her life. That's it. No hidden layers. You don't need a summary because the premise carries the whole book. I picked this up around 2012 on a recommendation from someone who knew I read a lot of crime fiction. It's not the kind of book you analyze for literary merit. It's the kind of book you read on a Tuesday night when you want something that doesn't require thinking too hard. The prose is functional. The plotting is tight, even if it's occasionally convenient in ways that would get any professional writer flagged by their editor.
If Tomorrow Comes By Sidney Sheldon
The structure is basically a revenge story disguised as a thriller. Amanda gets betrayed by her husband and his business partner, sent to prison for embezzlement she didn't do, meets a con artist named Lulu in the federal penitentiary, learns the trade, and then spends the rest of the book executing an elaborate scheme against everyone involved. The middle section where she's learning the cons is the strongest part. The ending wraps up with a level of neatness that feels almost clinical for a novel of this type. One thing I noticed reading it more carefully on a second pass: Sheldon doesn't actually make Amanda all that sympathetic at first. She's angry, which is different. The book lets her become sympathetic through competence rather than victimhood. That was probably intentional, maybe even ahead of its time for the genre. Most authors in the mid-eighties would have dangled her suffering in front of the reader for pages. Sheldon just gets her out of prison and starts the clock. There's a specific scene in the prison where Lulu teaches Amanda how to count cards, and it plays out like a regular tutorial. No flashbacks, no drama. Just two people in a common room going over numbers. I've been in similar settings where someone taught me a practical skill under unglamorous conditions, and Sheldon captures that exact feeling without drawing attention to it. He doesn't tell you it's a turning point in the narrative. He just lets it happen and moves on.
Why People Still Talk About This Book
The thriller market has changed a lot since 1985. Women-led revenge narratives are everywhere now, and plenty of them do something similar but with better pacing or more nuanced characterization. Still, If Tomorrow Comes holds up as a functional piece of entertainment. It's not great literature. It's not trying to be. It does what it says it will do and finishes the job in about three hundred pages. One practical note: if you're looking for a PDF or digital copy, the book is in the public domain in some territories and still under copyright in others depending on when you read it. It's widely available through major ebook retailers. I'd recommend the print edition if you can find it, mostly because the paperback formatting from certain publishers compresses the dialogue in ways that make it harder to follow conversations between characters. The audiobook version with Barbara Rosenblat as narrator is solid. She handles the shifts in Amanda's voice without overdoing the dramatic inflection, which is a common problem with narrators tackling this kind of material. Not every chapter needs to sound like a climax. A few passages in the second act drag when read aloud because Rosenblat keeps pushing the tension upward, but it's a minor issue.
Get the Full Details
I should mention that the book was adapted into a miniseries in 1986. It's not particularly good. Jane Seymore plays Amanda and does her best with limited screen time, but the adaptation cuts most of the cons and replaces them with standard dramatic confrontation scenes. If you watch it before reading the book, you're getting a watered-down version of what the novel actually does. Read the book first. There's a common misconception that this is Sheldon's best work. It isn't. Master of the Game and The Sun are more ambitious in scope. If Tomorrow Comes is competent pulp, and calling it anything more than that does the book a disservice. It's enjoyable exactly within its intended parameters. Go in expecting a fun heist story with emotional stakes, and you won't be disappointed. Go in expecting anything else and you'll be frustrated by the simplicity. The ending lands cleanly. No loose threads, no moral ambiguity, no twist that requires a reread to understand. Some readers find that unsatisfying. I find it satisfying because Sheldon commits to it. He doesn't hedge or add a coda to make the reader feel like they're getting deeper insight. The book ends when the revenge is complete and Amanda walks away. That's the structure he chose, and it works for what he's doing.
If you're new to Sheldon and want to start somewhere accessible, this is a reasonable entry point. It's shorter than most of his other novels, which tends to keep the pacing tight. His later books sometimes run too long because he keeps adding subplots. If Tomorrow Comes stays focused on one arc from beginning to end, which is probably why it has a reputation that exceeds its actual literary value. The character of Lulu deserves a separate mention. She's the only person in the book who operates without a clear moral compass, and Sheldon uses that to explore a point about survival in prison that most thriller writers ignore. Lulu isn't a mentor figure in the traditional sense. She's someone who's already adapted to the environment and sees potential in Amanda. The relationship develops through shared objectives rather than emotional bonding, which keeps it from becoming sentimentality. There's a section about Amanda researching the weaknesses of her enemies that works as a case study in patience. She doesn't rush. She watches, listens, and waits for the right moment. That's the practical lesson underneath the fiction, whether Sheldon intended it that way or not. Real cons require exactly this kind of discipline, and the novel reflects that without ever breaking into lecture mode.
For anyone wanting a copy, it's available through Amazon, Kindle, Audible, and most library systems. The Kindle edition runs about $4.99 and the paperback is usually under ten dollars. Nothing special pricing-wise. It's a mass-market novel selling at mass-market prices.
