Content area
Full Text
SUCKER BET, by James Swain (Ballantine, $19.99, 304 pp)
Sucker Bet is James Swain's third outing with 60-something ex- Atlantic City cop Tony Valentine, now a private consultant in business to bust up plots to swindle casinos. Sucker Bet very much resembles the first two Valentine novels, which is to say it is improbable, funny, populated with colorful bad guys who often resemble sendups of themselves, and impossible to put down.
Valentine, retired to Palm Harbor, is asked by the security chief of the Micanopy Indian Reservation Casino to help bring down a scam. A blackjack dealer dealt a customer a record 84 winning hands in a row and then disappeared. At the same time, a Nevada gaming official who is an old friend of Valentine's asks for help finding a man who was working as a blackjack dealer for the Micanopy casino in the Everglades and also has disappeared.
It will not spoil anything to reveal that the two dealers are one and the same, and that the man is dead.
In the process of trying to solve this mystery,...