Lucky O-Toole works at the Babylon resort in Las Vegas. As Head Customer Relations Officer, Lucky gets to solve problems that are thrown at her from left to right and probably from behind as well. She's been working for the owner of the Babylon since she was 15 and has worked her way up to the position she now holds. It doesn't matter that the boss is her father; she doesn't want anyone other than her boyfriend to know. Lucky wants to be respected for pulling her own weight.

In one night, an accident involving honey bees brought in for a convention, the District Attorney locked out of his suite -- naked, and a seedy odds-maker seen arguing with one of Lucky's friends, and later found in little pieces in a shark tank at another resort, are enough to stress her out. Then her boyfriend gets a call from the music industry in California. They want to hear him in person. Lucky sent them a demo disk without his permission and now that he is gone, she starts doubting her decision. She's not ready to say I love you, but she's not ready to give him up either.

Lucky spends the next few days working her many Las Vegas connections to help her friend, the private detective Jeremy Whitlock, to keep him out of jail for a murder she knows he did not commit. Providing the information she learns, she keeps the young police detective she has befriended, hot on the trail of the killer. On top of all of this and not even the half of what she is dealing with at work, her mother, the owner of a brothel, is trying to auction of the virginity of a young woman who needs money for medical school. One more thing that Lucky has found herself involved in. However, she might not have to worry about all her responsibilities because someone has threatened to kill her if she doesn't stop poking around in someone else's business.

Lucky is all out there and I'll be wondering what kind of fix she'll get involved in next time. Deborah Coonts has provided a wildly hilarious piece of entertainment between the covers of LUCKY STIFF.

Book Summary

Lucky O’Toole--Head of Customer Relations at The Babylon, premier mega-resort on the Vegas Strip--thinks it’s just another night in Las Vegas.  A tractor-trailer has spilled its load of a million honeybees, blocking not only the Strip but the entrance to her hotel... the District Attorney for Clark County—apparently the odd man out of a threesome on the twelfth floor—is hiding in the buff in one of the hotel’s laundry rooms... and Numbers Neidermeyer--one of Vegas’ less-than-savory oddsmakers--is arguing with Las Vegas’ ace private investigator, the Beautiful Jeremy Whitlock.

The next day, Lucky discovers Ms. Neidermeyer was tossed into the shark tank at the Mandalay Bay Resort as a snack for the Tiger Shark.  When the police show up at the Babylon with a hastily prepared search warrant, applied for by the District Attorney himself, and Jeremy lands in the hot seat, Lucky realizes her previous night was far from routine. 

Amid the chaos of fight weekend, the hiring of an eccentric new French chef, and her madam mother's intentions to auction off a young woman’s virginity, Lucky is drawn into a deadly game where no one is what they seem, a game that will end only when she discovers who made fish-food out of Numbers Neidermeyer.

Lucky O’Toole and Fabulous Las Vegas—life doesn’t get any better. 

Read an Excerpt