LADY LUCK

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.