Toronto, spring 2000: Philip Sharpe has everything—tenure at U of T, a bestselling pop-philosophy book, the life he always planned—until Vince Carta comes calling. Carta is southern Ontario mafioso, and he wants Philip to ghostwrite his biography: a philosophy-inflected hagiography, flattering and well-paid. Philip refuses. Or tries to. But Carta is persuasive, the compensation is considerable, and the two men share more in their worldviews than Philip would like to admit. As the summer unfolds and the façade of Philip’s perfect life begins to crack, the mobster’s offer begins to look less like a compromise than a reckoning. In this prequel to his 2017 novel, The Slip, Mark Sampson offers up another dark comedy about the ultimate absent-minded professor. Philip Sharpe in His Prime explores ambition, self-deception, and the uncomfortable distance between the philosophy we profess and the lives we actually lead.