Product Description

What Happens in Vegas . . .

Rita Rudner’s offbeat and on-target humor has won her rave reviews, passionate fans, and a record-setting, headlining show on the Vegas strip. Now she unleashes her hilarious take on Sin City in this comic romp filled with gambling, strippers, double-crossing exes, swingers’ conventions, magicians, and everything else that’s supposed to stay in Vegas.

Our heroine is Allie Bowen, a small-town girl who took a gamble on the big city that’s finally beginning to pay off. At twenty-six, she has a plum job at Heaven, a wonderland of vice that is Las Vegas’s hottest casino and the most profitable hotel in the world. Enshrouded in man-made clouds, Heaven is the kind of place where the security guards hide their glocks beneath white robes and wings.

As vice president of public relations, Allie glides easily from bribing nosy news teams with Cher tickets to comping disgruntled guests with visits to all-you-can-eat buffets. To top it all off, Allie is dating the handsome and ambitious Christian Sacco, a successful casino executive with his eye on the president’s office. Christian may not be perfect, but he’s much more of a go-getter than Allie’s ex-husband, an out-of-work, nice guy/terrible magician named Barry Houdini.

Little does Allie know that Christian has a ruthless streak, and he has concocted a plot to rip off the casino. When the couple breaks up over a tiny argument (Christian thinks a threesome with his ex-girlfriend would be great; Allie disagrees), she unknowingly becomes the perfect fall girl for Christian’s scheme. Allie is about to learn that working at Heaven can really be hell.

Only in Vegas, baby.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #573678 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Released on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad and the Thai prostitutes might be men in comedienne Rudner's Vegas-based mystery romance. Allie Bowen is newly divorced and settling into her job as vice-president of marketing and public relations for Heaven, the Strip's newest and biggest casino that "is deliberately hidden... behind an obscuring cumulous mountain of man-made fog," when her life implodes. First, she gets dumped by her power-hungry boyfriend, Christian, "the third most important executive within the casino hierarchy," then he frames her for making fake casino chips. She's blackballed from casino work, and her ex-husband, Barry, also implicated, lands in jail. While Barry does his time, Allie launches First Impressions, an escort service specializing in celebrity "look-alike call girls," and travels in seedy circles in her quest to clear both their names. Rudner's satirical sense shines as she follows casino executives on a trip to Thailand to scout for the newest restaurant idea—drinking cobra blood—and tours Heaven's new Hello Goodbye project, where customers can have their birthing and dying needs met (one funeral package includes placing customers' ashes into golf balls with their picture emblazoned on them). An over-the-top sendup of an over-the-top city. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Stand-up comic Rudner's second novel offers a lighthearted romp through the sleaze that is Las Vegas. Allie Bowen is just a small-town girl, but she seems to have settled in just fine as the marketing director of Heaven, the largest and most outlandish casino ever erected on the Vegas strip (complete with pearly gates and manmade clouds). Her ex-husband is a struggling magician, but her current boyfriend, Christian Sacco, is an on-the-rise casino exec; if she plays her cards right (pun intended), the two might just become the royal couple of Sin City. Allie's gold-plated world begins to tarnish, however, when she's framed for passing phony chips. Could Christian be behind her demise? Allie is hell-bent on finding out, and she enlists the help of some unlikely partners to do so. Like her stand-up work, Rudner's prose is crisp and clever, though the lack of truly sympathetic characters may disturb some readers. Still, recommend this one to readers who like Olivia Goldsmith or Susan Isaacs. Mary Frances Wilkens
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“On stage, Rita Rudner is funny, sharp, and clever. On the page, she is funny, sharp, clever . . . and poignant.” —Steve Martin

“Once again, Rita Rudner proves there is intelligent life in entertainment, thank goodness!” —Whoopi Goldberg

“Somewhere along the way, she learned comic timing so well that her writing has the tempo of George Burns’s—and she’s only about a third the age of the old master.” —Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews

A fun book
I suppose the problem I have reviewing Rita Rudner books is that my introduction to her, "Naked Beneath My Clothes", was so fall-on-the-floor funny that no subsequent book can compare. But in "Tickled Pink" and now "Turning the Tables" she has written two solid, good read, funny novels with touches of human interest. The plot is well constructed, but of the sort that can only work in a farce. A woman has an affair with someone senior at the casino where they work, rides his coattails, falls out with him, and is betrayed by him. Then the husband she cheated on goes through a bad time and comes out a better man. She, meanwhile, raises the money for him to rise and triumph and, incidentally bring down the former boyfriend. That's the outline without giving away the punchlines. If you are looking for a light, funny book this is an excellent choice. It never slows down and the jokes keep coming. (Timing, timing, timing!)

An Enjoyable Read
I am one of those people that love the "image" of Vegas more than the reality. It is with delight that I watch shows like "Las Vegas" or films like Ocean's 11 (either version) and wallow in the fantasy world presented therein.
When I say Ms. Rudner on the recent Labor Day Telethon doing standup and saw Jerry Lewis hold up her book, I thought "why not?"
I did not know what to expect and was happily surprised. Turning the Tables offers the reader a fun story about Vegas and some of the happenings there. Casino politics, show biz wanna bees, dreamers, it is all there in a fun story whbere the good guys win. Boy, do I hope there is a sequel to this one!
If you want a light, but fun and exciting getaway read...this is it.

Rita is one funny woman
Rita Rudner is a terrific stand up commediene, however she is also an excellent fiction writer. Fine book, terrific price. What more can one ask?