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
Doesn’t entirely hang together but still manages to hit the spot.
In an alternate early-20th-century Montreal, sparks fly between the operator of a cat shelter and a reclusive magician.
Agnes Aubert is not kindly disposed toward magicians, especially not after a magical duel blows a hole in the building that housed her and her cat shelter. Unfortunately, finding another spot isn’t easy, so she’s happy to take the reasonably priced location on the Rue des Hirondelles. But that’s before she discovers the building’s owner secretly living in the basement: Havelock Renard, the world’s most powerful magician, who also happens to be allergic to cats. As this decidedly odd couple work out a system for cohabitation, Agnes develops some uncomfortable feelings for Havelock; she also can’t deny her attraction to the police detective who thinks (not entirely incorrectly) that the shelter is a front for the illegal sale of magical Artefacts. In comparison to the carefully constructed universe of her Emily Wildeseries, Fawcett’s worldbuilding and plotting are a bit sloppy; the magical system is not laid out as clearly as more pedantic readers might wish, and there’s one part of Agnes’ quandary that gets resolved in a rushed, not truly believable, way. The book also implausibly suggests that an allergy to cats is curable by exposure (rather than managed by a magical antihistamine, perhaps?). But one has to admire the author’s acumen in finding the absolute sweet spot for a cozy fantasy, after all the other ones set in cafes and adorable little shops. It could seem either twee or a cynical grab at the market, but it’s neither; Fawcett clearly understands the complicated but rewarding relationship between humans and cats. It is also charming to set a story in Montreal, where both brioches and bagels are on offer.
Doesn’t entirely hang together but still manages to hit the spot.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593973257
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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