"There are no innocent bystanders in Las Vegas. Nobody comes to Vegas to be innocent," writes Michael Ventura. Nobody knows this better than a Sicilian named Mike Rose, a private detective born in Las Vegas, the son of a chorus girl and a small-time hood from the Bugsy Siegel days. Rose was raised according to the code of the city: Scared money never wins. Maybe he knows his city too well; it's not only his turf but his prison, a place he loves and hates with equal fierceness.

When his brother, Alvi, unwittingly says the wrong thing at the wrong time, he sets in motion events that force Rose to confront both his family's past and Las Vegas itself - a city where the American Dream strips down to its nightmare nakedness.

This is a novel about people with neon in their blood. There are crimes in this novel, but it's not a crime novel. There's a detective in this novel, but it's not a detective story. The Mob, an ex-showgirl who runs a New Age church, and a client intent on murdering her husband suck Mike Rose into a neon-lit vortex that may have no bottom, and we come face-to-face with Las Vegas the way readers met Los Angeles in The Day of the Locust.