The Strip
A Novel
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Nick Conti, producer of the successful Las Vegas TV Show The $trip, is a busy man. Spending 15-hour days on the set and long nights drinking cocktails and cavorting with the fastest women in Vegas, he is hardly looking for extra work. But, when a local gangster begins plotting to extort money from the show, Nick realizes it's going to be a long week.
The small-time blackmail operation stirs up old demons, and the bigger bosses in Chicago and Kansas City begin asking questions. What's more, Nick's old flame has recently appeared on the scene, holding the arm of the mysterious Allie Saltieri, a man with mob ties of his own. With the star of The $trip in trouble and local journalists beginning to smell a story, Nick will have to rely on his guile and his charm to escape with his money, his job, and his life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clunky pacing and cartoonish characters weigh down Vincent's third crime thriller, set in Las Vegas in 1980. Amid efforts by Nick Conti, the producer and chief writer of The Strip, a popular PI TV series, to keep the local Mafia from interfering and getting a cut of the show's action, Conti finds time to do it all. He negotiates with Hollywood moguls, soothes wounded TV star egos, offers his irresistible self up to fawning actresses and slugs it out with mobsters with names like Carlo and Fats. The rapid-fire two- and three-page chapters give the book a cut-and-paste feel that may work on film, but leaves readers with too little explanation for what just happened. Worse, most of the characters talk the same way clipped, jaded and very, very with it. Himself a former writer and producer at Spelling Productions, Vincent (Mafia Summer) includes many real-life details and personages from Vegas's past, but the result is a story that reads like a superficial TV script.
