Sacred Seventh (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780648871712)

What if your worst decision became someone else's second chance?

Brisbane, 1992. Engineer Michael Whelan is devastated by one problem he can't fix: he's 'the issue', according to the IVF doctors. An experimental surgery in San Diego might give him and his wife, Daniela, a child, but the cost is out of their reach.

Widowed TAB owner Hazel Andrews is drowning in her late husband's debts and his mate Craig's creative accounting. All she really owns is a tired suburban betting shop and twenty thousand dollars in cash hidden off the books, while the bank closes in.

On an ordinary weekday, Michael walks into Hazel's TAB with a shotgun. Inside, he confronts Hazel; Charlie, a corporate lawyer avoiding his own mess; Angus, an ex-con who knows too much about fixing horse races; and Claire, an exhausted, struck-off doctor looking for a few minutes' reprieve from the bottle.

A tip on a country race that's not 'running straight' offers them a way out. The five of them make a pact to back one horse in the seventh at Alice Springs - and never speak of it again.

Years later, the fallout ripples through marriages, jail-time, hospital wards and racetracks. Eventually, they all must decide what matters more: the stories they've told themselves to live with what happened, or the truth about the dirty money that could change everything.