The Madonna of Las Vegas

This is a strange, intermittently gripping novel. It is a literary novel that is structured as a genre book--this time the noir mystery. It is when the book most closely hews to the mystery conventions that the book works best; when it flies off into metaphysical realms and theological history, the wheels fall off.

The book is about Cosmo Dust (an unfortunate start--this kind of oddball naming hasn't worked well since Dickens), an artist who is working on painting a replica of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling in a Las Vegas casino. He is a lost soul, because his wife, whom he loved deeply, died after eating a chocolate Easter egg that had been filled with cyanide.

As it is approaching the end of the millennium, Dust gets acquainted with a cocktail waitress, whom he invites up to his suite at the hotel, which is being comped to him by the owner, an organized crime boss known as the Pope of Las Vegas. When the cocktail waitress turns up murdered in his bathtub, he becomes the number one suspect. He then ends up teamed with the "Pope's" daughter and the waitress's baby, who may or may not be the new messiah.

The author, Gregory Blake Smith, has an obvious interest in liturgical history. There's stuff in here about the Kenotic messiah, the possible conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I, and gnosticism. Smith seems to enjoy contrasting this weighty stuff with the crass commercialism of Vegas, a city which has become such a metaphor these days. The fictional casino Dust works in is called the Golden Calf, but real casinos, especially the Venetian, are settings in the book, surely to explore the bizarre notion that beautiful places around the world are reproduced as tourist meccas in the middle of a desert.

About halfway through the book the action of the book slows down and gets tangled up in issues of identity and duality, and my eyes glazed over a bit. The conclusion doesn't offer much of a solution to the mystery and is ambiguous. That was okay, though, because I really didn't care about the main characters at that point, so their fate isn't something I'm worried about.