Roarke - History

History

Roarke grew up in the slums of Dublin, Ireland, directly after the last and worst part of the series' fictional "Urban Wars", a period of unrest, violence, and corruption. Roarke believed his mother to be his father's wife, Meg Roarke, an abusive woman who lived with his father, Patrick Roarke and walked out on him when the young boy was six. In reality, his mother was an eighteen year-old woman named Siobhan Brody, who Patrick beat to death after she ran away with Roarke.

Roarke is ten when he first meets Summerset and Summerset's eight-year-old daughter, Marlena. The father and daughter typically run cons. Shortly after their meeting, according to Roarke's account in Immortal in Death, Patrick beats Roarke almost to death and leaves him for dead. Summerset, who had medical training, saves and helps Roarke recover.

When Roarke is twelve, he finds out that his father has been murdered; he immediately heads down to the alley where the death supposedly occurred. Patrick Roarke is indeed dead, stabbed in the throat, an apparent victim of a mugging. Roarke checks his father's pockets and leaves.

It is revealed in Portrait in Death that the killing was not random. In fact Summerset killed Patrick, a fact he confirms only to Eve, who has guessed it. As of Memory in Death, Roarke still does not know that Summerset killed Patrick. Summerset's motivation was to protect Roarke.

When Roarke is sixteen, his gambling operation is earning a very high profit, too high for a competing group. Marlena confesses her love to Roarke and offers herself to him; horrified, Roarke rejects her and sends her away, thinking she would go back to her room. Instead, Marlena leaves the house and is captured by the competing group, and six men rape and torture her until she dies. They then drop off her body at Summerset's doorstep in the morning. When Roarke and Summerset call the police, they discover that the police have been bought off and will not pursue the case. Roarke thus takes his own justice by murdering those six men over a three-year period.

Roarke founds Roarke Industries in 2042, when he is (supposedly) nineteen years old. Presumably he must have immigrated to America by this point in time.

Further detailed information—at least in terms of years—is given throughout the books, revealing that Roarke worked as a pickpocket as a child (he sometimes takes Eve's badge from her without her knowledge to tease her) and as an adult, a thief of very expensive jewels.

Roarke has left most of his friends behind; he has one who tends a bar in Dublin, and another dies in Betrayal in Death. Many others have died or are unknown to him by the time the In Death books occur. With that, Eve's friends are also his friends.