Ben Mezrich

There are always people trying to find an edge on the gambling industry, and sometimes they succeed (at least for a while). Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House tells the story of a group of people who did just that. Math nerds! In the 90s, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a professor developed a method for team-based blackjack play, and recruited students to take his style of card-counting to Las Vegas. Card counting technically isn't illegal, but casinos can and will boot players who engage in it from playing on their floors. So while the teams are winning big, they're ever-watchful for security and the consequences that might come.

Mezrich fictionalizes all of his characters, including the one through whom he tells the story, calling him Kevin Lewis. A senior on track to graduate with an engineering degree and a steady girlfriend, he's intrigued when two of his friends tell him about the blackjack team they're on and take him along for a weekend at the casinos with them. There's the glamour and flash, but there's also the appealing intellectual challenge of the whole thing. He gets drawn into their world, going through their recruiting process to officially join the team, becoming at first a supporting player and then a main figure on the team. He grows distant from his previous life, breaking up with his girlfriend and having less and less he can talk about with his family, just marking time back home between his trips to Las Vegas with his team.

But they've caught the eye of the powers that be, and they can feel the pressure ramping up. Asked to leave from more and more casino floors, they try disguises, have third parties like strippers cash out their chips once they've been busted and banned, and when even those measures fail, seek alternate gaming venues. Riverboats. Reservations. Even overseas, leading to an incident in which team members are roughed up by the locals. Trust fractures between the members, and eventually there's nowhere else to go.

This makes a solid airplane read (which is where I read most of it myself). Kevin is easy to like...he doesn't get in as deep as some of the other players, which makes him seem grounded and more identifiable. There's a kind of fantasy element to it, the idea that you could learn a straightforward (albeit difficult to master) skill that could make you enormous sums of money, have a regular life as a normal person but live it up in VIP style on the weekends. The tension keeps up nicely and the plot moves along quickly. The book doesn't ask you to do too much in the way of critical thinking.

And maybe it's hoping you won't, because it came out afterwards that many of the more salacious aspects of the book were completely made up. The dramatic try-out in an underground gaming parlor, the strippers cashing out chips, even the physical assault...members of the team on which the book is based have come forward to say those are all lies. Which undermines the impact of the book, and completely discredits Mezrich as an author. And on Mezrich's authoring, this book is no great shakes in terms of prose quality. Everyone besides Kevin comes across as a narrow stock character, and the whole thing is written in a "this happened, and then that happened, and then the next thing happened" way that doesn't allow the material (however exaggerated it might be) to really shine the way it could have. It's entertaining enough, if you take it with an enormous grain of salt. It's far from unmissable, though, and if you're not interested in reading the source material for the movie 21 or in stories about Las Vegas/gambling, it probably won't do much for you.… (altro)

(2022) A card counter on the run from a casino and a just out of prison thief join forces to make sense out of a mysterious object that ties to the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere. Good premise and very readable but it turns into a Dan Brown wannabe novel. Much shorter and more tightly written than any of the Brown drek out there it still depends on coincidence and highly improbable events moving the plot along. Goes from hidden chambers and elevator shafts in the Bunker Hill monument to a confrontation on the USS Constitution. This results in the blowing to literal bits of one of their pursuers by a fake cannon on the Constitution. Thinking this was coming to a conclusion is dashed as the author has in mind a continuing series with our unlikely heros. To be continued (but not by me).KIRKUS: Mezrich, best known as a true-crime author, turns to fiction with this history-based thriller.The novel begins with a prologue that recounts the notorious (and still unsolved) real-life theft of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, then jumps to the present. Math genius Hailey Gordon is paying her way through graduate school at MIT by gambling at the casinos, and she's just been spotted counting cards. Fleeing casino security, she dodges through an open hotel room door�and finds a dead man. Right behind her is Nick Patterson, an ex-convict who's there to meet the now-deceased Jimmy the Lip, who was supposed to be his connection to the deal of a lifetimeÂ¥one connected to the Gardner heist. Hailey's and Nick's mutual desire to elude the cops quickly turns into a partnership to find the real object of the Gardner theftÂ¥which wasn't any of the priceless paintings but an object, as the title suggests, connected to Paul Revere. They're joined (grudgingly) in the hunt by Adrian Jensen, an enormously snobby history professor who's been propelled into a related quest by the murder of a despised colleague. In the mode of the history-based, conspiracy-fed thriller ? la Dan Brown, their race around Boston's historic landmarks takes place in just a day. But it feels like much longer. Thrillers like this one are grounded in research, but in this book the research is dropped in giant blocks that leave the action in park for pages at a time. At one critical point, when a character is about to fire a gun, the action is interrupted by almost 300 words on how to load a flintlock pistolÂ¥a disquisition that does nothing for the plot but bring it to a screeching halt. When the action does struggle to the surface, it's increasingly confusing and often improbable.A conspiracy-driven thriller stalls out on too little action and a dissertation's worth of research.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022ISBN: 978-1-5387-5463-4Page Count: 304Publisher: Grand Central Publishing… (altro)