Books: Loaded Dice by James Swain

Full house

By John Ziebell

James Swain is a truly interesting guy. He spent his formative years training to be a sleight-of-hand magician, is one of the greatest card handlers in the world, knows as much about cheating casinos as anyone alive and pursues none of those talents as a career option. Swain chose instead to be a writer, a decision that allows him to share a wealth of arcane knowledge with his audience.

Loaded Dice is the fourth novel in a series that features Tony Valentine, a retired Atlantic City cop whose "grift sense"--an innate and almost supernatural knack for catching gambling cheats--keeps him busily employed as a consultant to casinos.

When Valentine is promised a fat fee for a quick trip to Las Vegas, he thinks the visit will be a holiday of sorts. He's certainly not expecting to step off the plane into a snarl of coinciding and potentially deadly problems. First, there's a crooked cop who blames Valentine for the death of his stripper girlfriend and wants revenge. Valentine is also trying to track down his son, who is supposedly attending a card-counting clinic but has disappeared behind a trail of American Express charges--and unwittingly become the errand boy for Pakistani fundamentalists planning to blow up Sin City. That's before our protagonist rescues a potential suicide from a casino rooftop, a slot addict he finds himself increasingly attracted to. And in a few more pages he'll be trying to stop a cabal of sleazy casino moguls from bankrupting his friend Nick Nicocropolis, owner of the old-school Acropolis Casino. All in all, a pretty tough vacation for a guy in his 60s.

Swain knows how this writing business works, too. The strands of the story are woven together with care. The narrative picks up energy early and maintains its momentum through a series of very smooth shifts; Swain is very good at keeping a lot of balls in the air, as they say. He also knows what readers want from series fiction, and the regular cast members behave just the way we expect them to. Where the supporting players are concerned, though, he's almost too generous--there's a sense that Swain actually likes his creations too much, and in the end he pardons people who, at least structurally speaking, might be better off dead.

It's clear that Swain is fascinated by crossroaders, in terms of both philosophy and practical application, and it's a passion that he's successful at passing along. He enjoys not only the puzzles themselves, from the simplest card-marking strategies to the most complex computerized attacks, but explaining the processes to the uninitiated. Although real scams are more geekfests than glamour, Swain always manages to make Valentine's cases interesting, and a writer who can keep an audience engaged with crimes based in mathematics has a rare talent indeed.

While Swain may not get Vegas totally right, we can probably attribute his errors to artistic license. He's focused on a specific industry that he understands fairly well, and doesn't stray far afield. He has a great descriptive eye, and can construct characters with the best of them. But it's hard to disabuse people of the notions they cherish, and even writers who should know better love the delusion that the gaming industry still operates the way the Binions used to. On the other hand, while Swain's casino execs might be more Thugs-R-Us than Wharton School, some things truly do never change:

"That was the beauty of Las Vegas," one bad guy opines. "No matter what it was about, it was always about the money."