Turning The Tables by Rita Rudner

Rita Rudner is a comedienne with a dry wit. Besides specials and Las Vegas residencies, she has written a few books - Naked Beneath My Clothes, and, I Still Have It, I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It.

The action takes place in Heaven, a grand casino resort, somehow masked 24 hours a day in a mountain of man-made fog like the clouds. Only when you approach the casino can you see the giant stained glass windows and enter through St. Peter's Gates. Why the Heaven theme? Why not? God had always liked the desert. He set the Bible there.

The casino bosses are wrangling to be chairman, and our heroine Allie loses her boyfriend, then her PR job, caught up in an in-house money laundering scheme. Meanwhile, her ex-husband Barry has been framed and sent to prison.

She bartends at a high-class strip club, Leopards, and starts her own celebrity call girl look-alike business. When the money is rolling in, she leaves them high and dry and the business folds. Nice! She works to get Barry out and exact revenge on the money launderers who threw her out of Heaven. Her long-term scheme is to create a hit magic act in Australia that Heaven would have to bring back to the US. And then there's the side trip to Thailand's sex clubs and the casino's funerals and birthing business...

It's all over the place; there wasn't enough humour, and the side plots had no weight. As a comedian, I expected her to inject a little goofiness, but the novel tries to be serious. The tough descriptions of prison seem out of place for a light read like this. Heaven was a fun casino idea, but even that concept is pushed - the main theatre was designed by NASA, where the audience is suspended over the stage for the performance.

This looked like the inside scoop of Vegas casinos, but was a hit and a miss. it seemed like the story changed with the chapters and I was left turning the pages.

2006 / Hardcover / 224 pages