Tony Valentine has a gift for grift: He can walk into a casino and spot a cheater across a crowded floor. A man who still uses pay phones and won’t spend more than a buck for coffee, Tony has protected Atlantic City gambling palaces for twenty years and learned every trick of the trade—until a new one blows him away.
With his old partner murdered in a bomb blast, Tony returns to A.C. to retrace Doyle Flanagan’s last case. Investigating a six-million-dollar casino takedown, a square cop soon meets a whole lot of bent people, from a beautiful lady wrestler to some Manhattan mobsters; from a trio of beautiful casino “consultants” to a team of Eurotrash blackjack card counters. But while everyone around Tony Valentine (including Tony’s own son) is playing some kind of angle, Tony is determined to find a killer who is playing for keeps. . . .
From the Publisher
FASCINATING . . . DAZZLING . . . ENTERTAINING . . . I CAN’T THINK OF A NOVEL I’VE ENJOYED MORE THIS YEAR.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Writing about a world where everyone is on the take, Swain has a soft spot for colorful characters. . . . [H]is direct style works just fine.”
—The New York Times Book Review“SMART, SNAPPY . . . TREMENDOUSLY INFECTIOUS.”
—St. Petersburg Times
Publishers Weekly
The same warmth, honesty and inside expertise that made Grift Sense (2001) a memorable crime debut is back in spades in Swain's second book about ex-cop Tony Valentine, who advises gambling casinos on how to spot and stop cheaters. Swain might not be a Leonard or even a Hiaasen when it comes to a seamless writing style, but he makes up for it with insights into his characters' behavior that inevitably ring true. Tony's relationship with his hapless son, Gerry, is letter-perfect: a father's natural love warring at every turn with a hard man's distaste for weakness. No matter how often Gerry screws up, Tony finds some way to help him. This same ambivalence colors Tony's dealings with Archie Tanner, the brutal, bullying fixer who runs a vast Taj Mahal-like casino in Atlantic City and who now wants to buy his way into Florida's gambling industry. When Tony's ex-partner and lifelong friend Doyle Flanagan is killed while looking for a strange band of shabby Croatian math geniuses who are ripping off Tanner's blackjack operation, Valentine takes over the investigation. But it's not really revenge or the $1,000-a-day fee that motivates him: it's a weird but finally totally logical belief that the gambling business which preys on human weakness should at least be clean and honest. Stretching that analogy only a little, Swain makes Tony his Don Quixote tilting at blackjack tables and slot machines instead of windmills. Agent, Chris Calhoun. (June 5) Forecast: National print advertising, a three-city author tour, a blurb from Dick Lochte and the author's status as a gambling expert should help up the ante beyond that for Grift Sense. Should David Mamet take a flyer on the film option, the smart money's on Ricky Jay to play Valentine. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Former policeman Tony Valentine (Grift Sense) operates a gambling casino protection service out of his Florida home. When his former partner and best friend now a PI is murdered in Atlantic City, Tony vows vengeance on the "European," the elusive and resourceful scam artist his friend was investigating. Tony contacts the casino, which has been bilked of $6 million, and goes to work with surveillance tapes and his own personal network of contacts. Though hampered at times by his adversarial son, Mafia types, and others, Tony wins his game. A smooth narrative, credible situations, and a nervy plot make this second Tony Valentine mystery a highly recommended choice for most mystery collections. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Most of the mechanics who try to cheat the house take a powder the minute clouds of suspicion rise. But the European with the bad haircut who's been scamming The Bombay, Archie Tanner's Atlantic City casino, doesn't vanish; he kills. Because the victim is not only Tony Valentine's old friend and ex-cop partner, Doyle Flanagan, but the guy who was talking to Tony on a cell phone about his suspicions when his car blew up, Tony's eager to fly back from his Florida retirement home to his old stamping grounds and go after the European. So it works out beautifully that Frank Porter, The Bombay's surveillance chief, is under strict orders to hire Tony's consulting firm (Grift Sense, 2001) to figure out how the scam is worked. No sooner is Tony back in town than other complications arise. His worthless son Gerry, heavily in debt to some serious mobsters, has agreed to hand over a bar his father owns in repayment. And his old martial-arts teacher Master Yun wants him to stop a wayward student calling herself the Judo Queen from desecrating a dojo robe emblazoned with a sacred crane by wearing it into the pro wrestling ring. It's nice for Tony that one of these cases will bring him some major headaches among local scumbags, as well as a new ladylove, before he figures out the secret behind the brilliantly simple Bombay scam. Despite an improbably high villain count, even for Atlantic City: solid, spirited second case from an author who dishes out professional anecdotes as generously as Edna Buchanan.
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