Before I wrote crime novels, I was a lawyer. Legal mysteries back then were mostly set in traditional firms, with just enough lawyering to set up final courtroom scenes. I preferred novels that showed more of the nitty-gritty, the conflicts, and temperaments peculiar to different workplaces. I’d been binging Dick Francis, with his deep dives into jobs connected to racing, and I wished there were books with his level of detail in settings I knew—students scrabbling to make law review, firebrand litigators in labor firms, double-crosses in corporate practice, the horrors of bank law retreats. When I finished Francis’s excellent Whip Hand, I decided to try writing one myself.
What is it like to be a thief? I picked up Ghostman after writer Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) joked on Facebook that the book taught her how to rob a casino. This exciting story does that and much more. The protagonist is forced to untangle a caper gone FUBAR and then disappear without a trace. Through multiple twists and backstabbings, readers learn the fine points of pulling off grand thefts and long cons, the tricks and trials of becoming a permanent “ghost.” The information is offered seamlessly, with no jarring breaks from action or characterization. In my opinion, there’s never been a better heist novel, though its sequel, Vanishing Games, comes close. (Sadly, Hobbs died when he was only 26, leaving behind no additional manuscripts.)
'Fast, hard and knowing: this is an amazing debut full of intrigue, tradecraft and suspense. Read it immediately!' Lee Child
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I make things disappear. It's what I do. This time I'm tidying up the loose ends after a casino heist gone bad. The loose ends being a million cash. But I only have 48 hours, and there's a guy out there who wants my head in a bag.
He'll have to find me first. They don't call me the Ghostman for nothing...
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'Brilliantly clever, gripping and action-packed. Utterly original and bound to become a big-budget movie.' SUNDAY MIRROR…
After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1989 with an LAS degree in communications and a knack for artwork, I had no idea what I wanted to do. That was until my brother pulled me from my low-paid art job in Chicago to work as a clerk on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I eventually became a trader on that same floor, as well as an oil and gas dealer in New York. Screaming and yelling in the trading pits while money moved back and forth with a shout and a hand signal I learned more about investing, trading, and human nature through osmosis than I ever could in an MBA course.
Of all the books about trading written over the decades, perhaps none is still so beloved, revered, and followed as this 1923 classic by journalist Edwin Lefèvre. Although technically a work of fiction, the book really is about the life and trading style of one of the greatest speculators of all time, Jesse Livermore (told under the guise of “Larry Livingston”).
What makes this book such a treasure is not just its fun prose, and interesting glimpse into what the process of investing in old exchanges and “bucket shops” was over a century ago, when ticker-tape and board boys with chalk and ladders were one’s only information about market prices, but also how the mind of one of the world’s greatest traders worked.
This book offers many gems of knowledge about trading—based upon the general principle that, although methods and technologies change, human nature does not and therefore “there is…
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a fictionalized story based on the trading career of Jesse Livermore. It follows his journey from the age of 15 when he made his first $1,000 to becoming a Wall Street legend.
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
How does a girl go from working in a Thai restaurant to running a sports gambling operation in Costa Rica? All roads lead through Las Vegas, where Beth meets Dink a math genius. Sports bettors love to hang out in casinos it’s like a contact high. He hires her and she trains in the Vegas casinos. She not only becomes enthralled with the eccentric Dink and the colorful cast of characters that surround him but she shares their stories with you. It was the early days of Internet gambling, a free for all or so they thought. It is great to view the industry through the observant eyes of Beth whose colorful descriptions bring the characters to life.
“Beth Raymer’s crackling, hilarious memoir ricochets through the gambling underworld in Las Vegas, and is peopled with all manner of lovable wack-jobs, none of whom is quite as wacky—or lovable—as Raymer herself.”—Marie Claire
Beth Raymer waited tables at a dive in Las Vegas until a customer sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc., one of the town’s biggest professional sports gamblers. Dink needed a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn’t steal. Beth got the job.
Lay the Favorite is the story of Beth’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety…
I grew up on the coast of South Carolina, where many of the Golden Age pirates were welcomed as business associates and charming guests by some of the most influential people of the day. They are, to this day, considered local heroes. I read everything I could lay hands on about them, fiction and histories, and I knew my first book would have to be about the pirate I always pretended I could be, if I’d only been born two hundred years ago.
If there’s anything I like as much as pirates, it’s heist stories. The excellent follow-up to the amazing Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas rang every one of my bells by taking our favorite thieving bastards Locke and Jean to sea, under the command of a strong, brilliant female captain, Zamira Drakasha. And she’s not just a woman pirate – she’s a middle-aged, Black single mother, running her ship and being the best pirate any denizen of the high seas could aspire to be. Lynch caught a good bit of flack for this character, but I was delighted. You will be, too.
Escaping from the attentions of the Bondsmagi Locke Lamora, the estwhile Thorn of Camorr and Jean Tannen have fled their home city. Taking ship they arrive in the city state of Tal Varrar where they are soon planning their most spectacular heist yet; they will take the luxurious gaming house, The Sinspire, for all of its countless riches.
No-one has ever taken even a single coin from the Sinspire that wasn't won on the tables or in the other games of chance on offer there.
But, as ever, the path of true crime rarely runs smooth and Locke and Jean…
I’ve been playing card games since childhood, and have had a parallel interest in the mathematics behind the games for nearly as long. While I didn’t visit Las Vegas in person until 2000, the stories of how that city was built around the gaming industry quickly came to fascinate me. Digging into the details of the people who have made that city what it is and have come to make their way in the desert has been a fascinating sidelight that has enhanced my recent work writing books on gambling mathematics.
Grandissimo is a biography of Jay Sarno, the entrepreneur who built Caesars Palace and Circus Circus on the Las Vegas Strip and then lost his empire.
It is fascinating to see read about how Caesars Palace started with humble beginnings before rising to its current prominent place of the Strip. The book’s title is taken from Sarno’s last great obsession: a new Las Vegas mega-resort that was never built, and the story of how that project never happened is just as interesting as the tales of how the other casino resorts succeeded.
Jay Sarno built two path-breaking Las Vegas casinos, Caesars Palace (1966) and Circus Circus (1968), and planned but did not build a third, the Grandissimo, which would have started the mega-resort era a decade before Steve Wynn built The Mirage. As mobsters and accountants battled for the soul of the last American frontier town, Las Vegas had endless possibilities—if you didn’t mind high stakes and stiff odds. Sarno invented the modern Las Vegas casino, but he was part of a dying breed—a back-pocket entrepreneur who’d parlayed a jones for action and a few Teamster loans into a life as a…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
This is a novel based on Frederick’s own gambling addiction on the Mississippi riverboats. Ray and Jewel Kaiser love to gamble, until a fun night out becomes a compulsion. They find themselves showing up at the Paradise casino all hours of the day and night, becoming intimate with the employees and escalating their bets. After visiting the area, I knew the scenes in the casino ring true and the dialogue is so on point, that you root for Ray and Jewel even though in the back of your mind you know the house always wins.
A New York Times Notable Book In this darkly funny story, Ray and Jewel Kaiser try (and push) their luck at the Paradise casino. Peopled with dazed denizens, body-pierced children, a lusty grocery-store manager, and hourly employees in full revolt, this is a novel about wising up sooner rather than later--"a wise and funny tale" (New York Times Book Review) that is "masterfully observed" (John Barth).
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
This is a book made from a screenplay that tells the story from behind the felt. As a croupier you can always tell if an author knows their stuff. Stepping behind the table as a dealer Jack Manfred a rejected author becomes enmeshed in his new job. He intends to write a novel about this fascinating world of casinos. As a writer myself I can relate to his need to tell his story. London dealers are considered the gold standard in the casino world. Their intense training thins the herd. I know because my husband learned to deal at an upscale London casino just like Jack. Ray also went to The Grecian Grill an all-night Greek restaurant in the West End after his shift. That touch of authenticity gave Croupier my stamp of approval.
You have to make a choice in life. Be a gambler or a croupier. Then live with your decision come what may. It's all numbers, the croupier thought. A spin of the wheel. A turn of a card. The time of your life. The date of your birth. The year of your death. In the Book of Numbers the Lord said: "Thou shalt count thy steps." A wave of elation came over him. He was hooked again. Watching people lose. His existence was forming an interesting pattern of betrayals. Sometimes he was unsure whether he was the betrayer or the…
I’ve been playing card games since childhood, and have had a parallel interest in the mathematics behind the games for nearly as long. While I didn’t visit Las Vegas in person until 2000, the stories of how that city was built around the gaming industry quickly came to fascinate me. Digging into the details of the people who have made that city what it is and have come to make their way in the desert has been a fascinating sidelight that has enhanced my recent work writing books on gambling mathematics.
No list of Las Vegas entrepreneurs is complete without Bob Stupak, the marketing mastermind who successfully sold many tourists on a visit to Vegas World, a small casino at the far northern end of the Las Vegas Strip.
The self-described maverick challenged the more established Las Vegas casinos throughout his career, culminating in the building of the Stratosphere Tower which now anchors the Las Vegas skyline. His story mingling success and failure is skillfully told here by a titan of Nevada journalism.
Of all the modern Las Vegas casino operators, none had more flair than Bob Stupak. The self-proclaimed "Polish Maverick" rose from humble origins as the son of a Pittsburgh boss gambler to head one of the largest privately owned casinos in Las Vegas, the infamous Vegas World. Stupak parlayed a small slot joint into a $100 million-a-year gambling operation by manipulating the local and national media with outrageous stunts and promotions. His headline-grabbing handiwork is now the stuff of Las Vegas legend.
Remember Vegas World's VIP Vacation? Stupak's cleverly worded advertisements flooded millions of mailboxes around the country and appeared…
For as long as I can remember, it has been of the utmost importance to find meaning in life—both for myself and for everyone else. I have spent much of my time in the past few years pushing for continued discourse in the fields of philosophy and psychology. I have studied at various educational institutions in these fields, and have thus used that knowledge to discuss topics relating to such on my podcast, Think More, which can be found on Spotify. I founded an online journal titled Modern Rebellion in the hopes of assisting contemporary artists and intellectuals with getting their work out there into the public eye.
Bukowski had a unique perspective on the world, and anyone who has read his work would most definitely agree. This book, which is a collection of some of Bukowski’s greatest pieces in my opinion, has a way of resonating with you on a personal level. Whether it be gaining a newfound perspective on the animals that scurry around our yards, or of a gambler wasting away in a casino on a Monday afternoon, Bukowski has a knack for bringing up the world’s problems in a way that is both depressing and humorous at the same time, while also giving peeks at his wit and charm as well.
Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.
I read at least 100 books each year, mostly novels, and before I became a published author in 2019, used to send a list of my favorite 30 to hundreds of friends, friends of friends, and family. I began hosting New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, in 2018, and have interviewed over 180 authors so far. It was tough to choose just 5 top books, but in looking over all those interviews, I remembered how much I loved reading these books, all set in the United States long before the 21st century.
A smart, quick-witted civil war widow is forced to make her way in 1867 Chicago, but nobody listens to an unmarried young woman unless she has a tough, gun-toting ex-rebel soldier as a partner.
They have a case to solve, and she uses a professional name, Mrs. Paschal, so nobody connects her with the former in-laws who are trying to stop her from receiving her dead husband’s estate. Loved reading about 19th Century pre-fire Chicago, teeming with corrupt politicians, gambling parlors, and bawdy houses of ill-repute.
Also, someone is trying to murder Quinn Sinclair, aka Mrs. Paschal. Can’t wait to read more from Jeanne Matthews.
What's a 20-something Union war widow to do in 1867? Start up her own detective agency with a former Reb POW, of course!
Quinn Sinclair, who uses the name Mrs. Paschal professionally, and her wryly observant partner Garnick get two cases on the same day - one to help a man prove he didn't kill his wife, another to help a lawyer find reasonable doubt that his client killed her ex-lover's new bride. As the detectives dig deeper, they unearth facts that tie the cases together in disturbing ways.
This tantalizing tale of 19th Century Chicago comes complete with corrupt…
