Wanna Get Lucky?

I checked out this book because it is set in Las Vegas, and I'll read any book set there. Long-time readers of this blog know I'm obsessed with Vegas, and may know more about it than any other person who's never lived there.

Wanna Get Lucky?, by Deborah Coonts, does have a lot of details about Vegas right, and the author hits all the spots one would expect. The narrator is the custom service manager of a fictional casino (the Babylon), and there are side trips to a brothel in nearby Pahrump, a swinger's convention, an adult film expo, and the pirate fight in front of the Treasure Island. The only thing missing was a midnight trip into the desert, or a stop at Area 51.

This is classified as a mystery novel, but there's not much mystery. It gets off to a juicy start; a woman falls from a helicopter and lands splat in the middle of the Treasure Island spectacular. Lucky O'Toole, the aforementioned casino employee, knows the victim (the helicopter is from her casino) and smells a rat. A new security guard has her suspicious, and when a swinging, 400-pound minister is being blackmailed she starts to put it all together.

The problem with this book is that it's formulaic, saccharine, and highly unbelievable. Do the Las Vegas police really take orders from a casino employee? Maybe, but I never really bought Lucky as a character. Maybe it's her name, which sounds like a chain of Irish pubs, or that every word out of her mouth is sarcastic. She seems to be piggybacking on a string of sassy female protagonists, from Kinsey Milhone to V.I. Warshawski to Stephanie Plum. I got the feeling this is just the first Lucky O'Toole book, and I'm not looking forward to more.

Perhaps I'm the wrong gender. This book was clearly intended for women. One chapter is dedicated to O'Toole and her frumpy assistant getting make-overs (so the frumpy assistant can promptly bed a hunky private eye) and Lucky has a sappy romance with the female impersonator who lives upstairs. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop in this relationship, like he was the killer or something, but no, it's strictly romance novel stuff, with the buff hero looking good in a dress.

Coonts gets pretty explicit with the sex industry stuff, kind of mocking it while trying to be blase. I think it might be the same effect a sex-toy party would be in a suburban household.