A sharp, madcap crime novel set on the less glamorous side of the Vegas Strip.
In DiPlacido’s comic Las Vegas crime novel, a showgirl learns she may have supernatural luck.
Sherri DiPedi is a showgirl—sort of. She works as a mermaid at a Las Vegas establishment known as the Grotto, where she swims around five hours a night in a skimpy swimsuit. For Sherri, a former Olympic swimmer, the job keeps her in the water, though she’ll soon be out of work if she fails to agree to the new owner’s request that she start performing topless. She’s deciding what to do when a falling neon sign outside the club concusses her. After she comes to, a drag queen convinces Sherri that the sign hitting her was no mere coincidence. In fact, it was a rebirth: Sherri is now the newest personification of Lady Luck in Las Vegas, a position that comes with the responsibility of helping those whom fortune does not favor. At first, Sherri is incredulous. “Lady Luck,” she thinks. “What, she was supposed to go around blowing on dice at craps tables and hooking up long-lost lovers? No one did that!” Sherri could use some luck, however. A few months ago, her father died under mysterious circumstances—he accidentally ate coconut, a food to which he was deathly allergic. Sherri suspects that bakery owner Stan Crossman, her father’s longtime friend, orchestrated the murder, particularly since Stan married Sherri’s mother shortly after her widowhood and is now poised to take over the dead man’s produce business. Maybe her newfound luck—and the hunky cop she met when she got bonked on the head—can help Sherri get to the bottom of her father’s death and extract a confession from Stan. But can she do it without bringing misfortune on herself and all of Las Vegas? Sherri must decide how far she’s willing to press her luck.
DiPlacido’s prose is sly and precise, and she deploys it effectively to create moments of shock and humor. Here the normally unruffled Sherri feels some violent anger brimming inside of her: “Now. Listen. Sherri had consumed a few cocktails…it was at that precise moment that the cocktails and antihistamines collided with Sherri’s despondency at her job loss and with sixteen years of guilt and six months of grief and it all created an incredibly potent new emotion that surged through her limbs.” The plot is intricate and the cast is large (including a confusing number of mixed marriages, stepsiblings, stepcousins, and the like). It presents Vegas as an incestuous place where a couple of families run everything from the casinos to the food delivery businesses. DiPlacido doesn’t take much time to introduce her side characters, nor does she work hard to make sure the reader feels very invested in them, which results in the narration often feeling ironic and stylized rather than propulsive or emotional. Even so, it’s a fun, chaotic world, one in which seemingly anything—good or bad—can happen at any moment.
A sharp, madcap crime novel set on the less glamorous side of the Vegas Strip.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2010
ISBN: 9781450543002
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
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