Kindle Book Reviews

 My latest book, Vegas and the Chicago Outfit , took a little longer to finish researching than I had hoped. Instead of a year to research, write, and edit, my plan for October 2020 somehow went south. That's my way of saying I'm two years late getting my most detailed compilation of the rise of the Chicago Outfit and their inexhaustible takeover of every money-making casino in Las Vegas down in book form. If that description sounds exaggerated, it's not. The Chicago Outfit came to the party in Las Vegas a bit later than the New York families. Still, by the late 1940s, the Windy City group had firm control of a half-dozen casinos from the Flamingo to the El Rancho, Thunderbird, and others.  By the 1960s, they had skimming operations in the Sands, Dunes, Aladdin, Riviera, Mint, Fremont, Stardust, Desert Inn, and of course, Caesars Palace. The Chicago Outfit simply took the reins and shook harder than any other families, even with Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Kansas City...

  Michael Allen's The Deeper Dark is a military-political thriller with a haunting forecast of what could happen when our political system controls just a tiny bit more of our lives than it already does. Our story starts with a pilot's worst nightmare: being forced down over enemy lines. Then, like John McCain and other real-life wartime pilots, his nightmare comes into even scarier focus as he is met immediately by the opposition forces who are armed and most certainly dangerous. In Deeper , pilot Haven Kayd is taken to a dank and soon to be dark cell that has housed many other prisoners. The fact that he's the only one there is less than comforting. For months Kayd fights away the psychological fears his captors impose on him and manages to escape, only to find that his nightmare continues when he returns home to find his wife and daughter shocked to see him. They've been told he's dead. The message finally dawns on him: Fear the Deep State. Kayd asks questions a...

I was reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey this afternoon and I realized that while the author has a serious, life-threatening addiction to drugs and alcohol, I too have a serious addiction. I read, I write, and I am clinically insane according to a fairly smart guy: Albert Einstein. Einstein said the definition of insanity was "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome." Well, like an addict who spends all their money on drugs, I keep spending mine on housing, food, and student loans. That would be alright, but I'm not living in a nicer home, I'm still hungry every day, and I'm not any smarter. So, I must be insane. And, I keep writing blogs (here, there, everywhere - at least I'm consistent at my Casino Gambling Blog , and stories and books and I'm still wthout a best seller. Perhaps because I write books that I would like to read instead of what is popular. Bummer. Anyway, A Million Little Pieces is t...