Redemption Road (previously published as Stabbed Ego).

"It makes for hair-raising reading." - The Daily Telegraph.

'I'm thinking it's a punctured lung . . . Who did this to you?' The paramedic looked hard into my flickering eyes. As I lay dying in the back of a screaming ambulance, my main concerns should have been about life and death. But while I did want to live, it wasn't because I loved life, but because I wanted to be around to hear the story of my survival.

Life wasn't as important to me as my ego. 

This was all just a popularity contest. The fights, the crews and the leadership were all just tools to be talked about. To be heard, to be seen - that was my life. To be stabbed and survive was, in my crazy world, a badge of honor. It was a story that would, of course, be spoken about.

My father had always told me that the smart ones go unheard. I grew up believing that, but the feelings I gained from this popularity contest - a contest I felt I was winning - were unmatched.

Struggling to stay alive with a gaping wound across my back, I desperately wondered how I got to this point. My knife-wielding opponent was not the attacker; it had been an act of self-defense. He'd been defending himself against an ego-driven, menacing thug who was intent on hurting him. That thug was me. With my breaths getting shorter from my pierced lung, I closed my eyes . . .

In a hole of anxiety and depression, Luke Kennedy resorted to drugs, alcohol and fighting in a desperate bid to silence his frantic mind. Soon he was leading a street-fighting crew, and constantly coming close to killing others or being killed. Tortured by the voices in his head, Luke began looking for an out. Eventually he found it.