Starred Kirkus Review: Lucky Bastard by Deborah Coonts
“If you’re entertained by sex, innuendo and a few fantasies you’d like to see played out—and who isn’t?—you ought to have Lucky and her extended Vegas family (So Damn Lucky, 2012, etc.) on speed dial.”
Lucky Bastard, by Deborah Coonts, gets a starred review in Kirkus Reviews!*
Here’s the full review, from the April 1 issue:
Like everything else in Vegas, the corpse is displayed extravagantly, draped over the hood of a candy apple red Ferrari, the heel of a Jimmy Choo stiletto embedded in her neck.
Lucky O’Toole, that lusty, wryly self-deprecating troubleshooter for the glitzy Babylon Casino, is patching up the ding the departing cabaret singer Teddie left in her heart by drooling over French chef Jean Charles. She’s just fired the much-loathed poker room manager and secured a seat at the high-stakes table for a deaf young man when she’s called on to deal with the dead woman perched on the pricey Ferrari spotlighted in the casino’s dealership. Babylon security tapes show the soon-to-be-dead gal cheating but losing big anyway, then getting followed from the card table by Dane, her soon-to-be ex. As Lucky and Detective Romeo try to round him up, other problems surface. The poker room manager is poisoned. Shady Slim Grady, who always shows up for the big-stakes poker tournament, turns up dead in his plane, and his wife, bimbo Betty Sue, insists on sending him off with a gaudy Celebration of Life party. The deaf kid disappears. Offshore betting sites come into play. A storm makes Lucky traipse through Vegas sewer pipes after a mystery woman. Jean Charles’ 5-year-old son is due to arrive from France, and Lucky is scared to meet him. The Department of Justice is running a sting operation that has as much a chance of succeeding as the mayoral campaign of Lucky’s mom, a former madam now hitched to the Babylon’s Big Boss. Then, just as matters are simmering down, Teddie returns.
If you’re entertained by sex, innuendo and a few fantasies you’d like to see played out—and who isn’t?—you ought to have Lucky and her extended Vegas family (So Damn Lucky, 2012, etc.) on speed dial.
Lucky Bastard will be published on May 14th.
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“An exceptionally thoughtful, searching and intriguing debut.”Like Jupiter’s Europa, Ilmatar is a moon of a giant gas planet. Here, under a roof of ice a kilometer thick and beneath a deep ocean, a team of Earth scientists has established a habitat in order to study the blind, intelligent aliens who resemble giant, lobsterlike, bald otters and whose home is this lightless, frigid, forbidding environment. The explorers have come to an agreement with a six-legged alien race, the Sholen, humanity’s first extraterrestrial contact, not to disturb the Ilmatarans or their habitat. But when media blowhard Henri Kerlerec persuades scientist Rob Freeman to venture out in secret so that Henri can use his new stealth diving suit to film the Ilmatarans up close, the Ilmatarans eventually detect him and, being scientists themselves and not recognizing him as intelligent or alien, dissect him. According to the Sholen, this constitutes interference; having repeatedly ruined their own planet, the Sholen’s misguided and self-appointed mission is to make sure nobody else ruins their planet either, so they order the humans to withdraw. Wary of the older, more advanced Sholen technology, the humans decide on passive resistance. Inevitably, matters slowly escalate into overt violence. More impressive than the worldbuilding, which is based on logical extrapolation, is Cambias’ diligent consideration of the technology required to survive in such an extreme environment. Best of all are the aliens. Ilmataran civilization is based on farming the products of deep-sea hot-water vents, while their perceptions and communications employ sound and pressure waves—although, since oxygen is poisonous to them, it’s difficult to envisage what gives them metabolic power enough to support intelligence. The Sholen behave according to consensus reached through political and sexual bonding.
