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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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