The Pact

For 34-year-old Eve Weston, life couldn't get much bleaker. Her con artist father recently committed suicide and her younger brother Terry was sent to jail. Then she lost her job too, because a close friendship with married solicitor Henry Baxter was misconstrued as an affair. Having temporarily moved away from London, she's now living in her father's old flat in one of the shabbier parts of Norwich. On a visit to see Terry, Eve is shocked to find him battered and bruised. He refuses to tell her who has done it or why. Eve begins to have serious fears that her brother won't survive his sentence, and in desperation she turns to another prisoner, a dangerous-seeming individual called Martin Cavelli. They make a secret pact: if Cavelli protects Terry then she will pay whatever it costs.

For 34-year-old Eve Weston, life couldn't get much bleaker. Her con artist father recently committed suicide and her younger brother Terry was sent to jail. Then she lost her job too, because a close friendship with married solicitor Henry Baxter was misconstrued as an affair. Having temporarily moved away from London, she's now living in her father's old flat in one of the shabbier parts of Norwich.
On a visit to see Terry, Eve is shocked to find him battered and bruised. He refuses to tell her who has done it or why. Eve begins to have serious fears that her brother won't survive his sentence, and in desperation she turns to another prisoner, a dangerous-seeming individual called Martin Cavelli. They make a secret pact: if Cavelli protects Terry then she will pay whatever it costs.

Publishers Weekly

Eve Weston's younger brother is in jail, her cancer-ridden father has committed suicide and she's been fired from her job for something she didn't do then things get really complicated for the 34-year-old former legal secretary in Kray's skillful if overlong sophomore effort (after 2006's The Debt). The collateral damage piles up while Eve, who's moved from London to her father's flat in Norwich, struggles to unravel the myriad skeins that tangle her life: her brother's real role in the robbery he was sentenced for; the meaning of her father's death; the handsome policeman wooing her; the packages she's guarding for the con protecting her brother and the mysterious item that someone named Joe thinks she is hiding. Though Kray choreographs too many unlikely convergences, she delivers well-drawn minor characters and a resilient, appealing heroine who uses brains and beauty to deal with the devils that beset her. (Mar.)

Roberta Kray was born in Southport in 1959. She worked in publishing and media research in London for fifteen years. In early 1996 she met legendary London gangster Reg Kray and they married the following year. Her first book, Reg Kray: A Man Apart, was a biography of her husband. She currently lives in Norfolk.