Lisa Pasold

It’s no surprise that Lisa Pasold’s day job is as a travel writer. In The Rats of Las Vegas, she effortlessly brings post-Depression era Vancouver to life and then packs our bags to take us on a tour of Las Vegas before the lights and the glitter, before David Copperfield, back when it was a dusty mob-made town in the desert with the few casinos gleaming like oases.

Millard Lacouvy plays poker. Really well. Prodigy-like. And in a time when women were largely confined to homemaking and child-rearing, she is a fierce, self-sufficient woman forcing her way into the masculine world of poker, unwilling to let even her closest friend-turned-lover sway her from the cards and her life of independence. She works her way up, playing first in a bar owned by her substitute father--the man who taught her to play in the first place--and then graduates to the higher stakes world of trains, where games are played in empty carriages. Firm in her devotion to cards, even after an encounter with a sore loser leaves her bruised, battered and out several thousand dollars, she heads for the relative safety of casino life in Vegas working for mobster Bugsy Siegel, where she is watched over by a six-foot man in a silk robe and kicky mules. But the safety of Vegas is exactly that: relative.

Without ever seeming laboured, Pasold’s sentences are lush, filled with unexpected and yet perfectly apt turns (“As if a girl can get herself pregnant--even the Virgin Mary needed some help.”), making Millard and the half-forgotten world of Vancouver and Vegas in the 1940s come to life. You can almost smell the gas and wet asphalt of the rainy city as Millard slips through the streets.… (mer)