What happens when a guy walks into a casino and wins a million dollars playing craps, roulette, blackjack and poker, all without losing a single hand? In James Swain's Mr. Lucky: A Novel of High Stakes (Ballantine, 354 pp., $19.95), the casino immediately investigates the possibility—even probability—that they have just been defrauded. And that's where Tony Valentine, retired cop and scam expert, comes in. Tony thinks he has seen it all until Ricky Smith, a nobody from a small North Carolina town, gets too lucky in Las Vegas.
When Tony travels to North Carolina to investigate, he finds enough deceit and violence to strain his faith in himself and put his family in jeopardy at the same time. Along the way, there's lots of action, a little philosophy and an education in the art of the swindle. Words and phrases like "thumper," "chip scam," "rail birds" and "playing top hand," with definitions and examples, permeate the story, providing glimpses into the world of casinos and the grifters who try so hard to cheat the house.
This is Swain's fifth Tony Valentine book, but readers will not be lost if this is their first exposure to the battle-hardened old sleuth. Swain provides the needed background and moves his characters purposefully to a complete resolution in the classic mystery tradition. The author is himself a renowned expert on gambling cons and scams and has based Mr. Lucky on a variety of real-life events.
It's a good story, but the real fun comes in seeing a small part of a struggle unknown to most: the battle to keep honesty alive in a multi-billion-dollar industry founded on exploiting human greed. There are no godfathers here, no mobsters in silk suits. As Swain observes early in the book, "It was a well-known fact that the Mafia had been run out of Las Vegas years ago. What wasn't well known was that the men who'd replaced them were just as ruthless; only, they had MBAs from the Harvard Business School." Through the eyes of Tony Valentine, Swain lets us in on the lifestyles of the dishonest, the hopeful and the coolly calculating people who together keep casinos around the world busy 24 hours a day.
James Swain reads from Mr. Lucky at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on March 8 at 6 p.m.
—Chris Scot
