eBooks - Mystery - Detective Stories - Gregory Blake Smith - The Madonna of Las Vegas
The Madonna of Las Vegas eBooks
by Gregory Blake Smith
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Platforms
Windows 98SE+, Mac OS X+, Palm Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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Platforms
Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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Platforms
Windows PC, Palm, Pocket PC, eBookMan, SmartPhones, and more. Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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Platforms
All Palm & Pocket PC handheld devices plus all Windows and Macintosh computers. Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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The Madonna of Las Vegas Summary
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Chapter 1: Standing in Line to Jump Off the Golden Gate Bridge At the party, he began setting women’s hair on fire. It seemed the right thing to do, what with the Apocalypse on CNN and all. The first time had been an accident, the ash from his cigarette somehow finding its way into the office receptionist’s hairdo, but now he was on his third victim, sitting in the office lounge with his arm draped over the back of a couch, nonchalantly nosing his Kool’s smoldering tip into the black hair of one of the waitresses from the Golden Calf. He would quit in a minute, he told himself. He would pack up his moral destitution and go home. His name was Cosmo Dust and that wasn’t the worst of it. Just what the worst of it was changed from day to day, though a good candidate right now was the Apocalypse taking place on television: the FBI up in rural Montana with their klieg lights and armored vehicles, the Kenotic Messiah reading from Revelation to the eager cameras. On another day he might have listed his living in Las Vegas, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for a living, being 5'5" tall . . . oh! he could go on, but here he caught a whiff of acrid smoke from the cocktail waitress and rose to go before anyone else noticed. Outside, he was dismayed to see he would have to stand in line to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. This was his friend Crazy Herman’s millennium party, held at the offices of Amalgamated Illusion, the commercial art company responsible for most of the turrets and sphinxes of post-Sinatra Las Vegas. The offices were housed in the snack bar of the old Las Vegas Drive-In, the drive-in grounds themselves filled now with Quonset huts and windowless staging buildings in which every imaginable casino set could be designed and built. Cosmo himself had worked on the Versailles Palace and the Tomb of Tutankhamen. But just that morning, halfway through a three-year job of reproduci... |
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It’s the hair-raising countdown to a new millennium, and Cosmo Dust watches in dismay as the wreckage of his life comes into garish focus in the glow of post-Sinatra Las Vegas. Surrounded by the simulacra of Western civilization, Cosmo finds himself strong-armed by the Golden Calf Casino into recreating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: a task that makes a mockery of both Michelangelo’s genius and Cosmo’s skill. Just when Cosmo has decided to quit this job to search for something real, Reality trumps him by making him the chief suspect in the murder of a cocktail waitress. Joining forces with the daughter of the Pope of Las Vegas, the local mob boss, he tries to piece together who’s killing whom and why. Navigating a world that subverts rational motivation, Cosmo and the Pope’s daughter encounter film-noir homicide detectives, Gnostic monks, a Vatican Inquisitor, and a baby who may or may not be the messiah. A masterfully written novel that is part romantic comedy, part dysfunctional detective story, The Madonna of Las Vegas exuberantly explores the quest for a genuine life in a world built on false appearances. |
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eBooks - Titles - Authors - Mystery - Detective Stories - Gregory Blake Smith - The Madonna of Las Vegas eBooks