ROUGH DIAMONDS

In Johnson’s thriller, a velvet pouch of uncut diamonds sets some of Las Vegas’s slickest, most violent, and most desperate characters on a collision course.

Chaos sweeps the Vegas Strip when Skinny, an unhoused young man with a heroin habit, signs for a FedEx package containing uncut diamonds. The delivery is meant for Emmy, a jeweler trying to clean up his act even as he keeps handling stones tied to the Chicago Outfit’s stolen-gem pipeline. Skinny loses the gems in a nightclub where Cory, a teenage busboy and aspiring comedian, finds them and passes them to his boss, Deedee, who locks them in the club’s safe. Skinny’s “best friend” and petty thief Niven isn’t about to let this unforeseen stroke of luck slip through their fingers, but the mob has no intention of allowing their ill-gotten gains to slip away so easily, and Karol “the Swede” comes to Sin City to reclaim them. Yet by the time he arrives, the diamonds have disappeared like the queen in a corner game of three-card monte. Skinny ultimately flees into the flood tunnels under the city—the domain of the volatile Rat King, whose underground community of Vegas’s lost souls becomes the dingy staging ground for a violent confrontation between all unfortunate parties involved. Johnson structures the narrative out of sequence, building tension and intrigue while letting scenes jump forward and backward in time so readers can assemble the chain of events alongside the characters. (The ensemble cast of characters is large but never overwhelming.) Shifting viewpoints effectively build a street-level portrait of Las Vegas, where the games play out on tables but all the real business is done under them. The story relies heavily on addicted and unhoused characters to keep the diamonds in motion, and there are times when the use of their vulnerability and hardships as caper-fuel feels slightly exploitative. But while they’re not always handled with the utmost sensitivity, even characters like the Rat King never slip into parody, and the novel’s sharp pacing never flags.

A bracing crime story in which one mistake drags strangers into a violent descent.