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A magician and expert in spotting scams, Swain invests in Valentine his passion for keeping hustlers and cheats -- including dealers, pit bosses and cops -- out of casinos where players assume everything is on the level. As a cop in Atlantic City, Valentine developed a talent for unraveling gambling schemes. After retiring to Florida, however, he made a fortune working as a consultant to casino owners who were being targeted by card counters, dice switchers, dirty dealers, game riggers and other "crossroaders." There aren't many scams Valentine hasn't seen, or couldn't sniff out in a hurry, but Swain's readers can rejoice in the knowledge that computer technology has turned the page on a new chapter of illegal get-rich-quick schemes for his protagonist to tackle.

Loaded Dice is set almost entirely in Las Vegas, where Valentine is a familiar presence among casino owners and state gaming officials. He has been hired by owners of the new Sin resort, who, in the guise of picking Valentine's brain to improve security at their joint, actually intend to use his counsel to put a colorful old-school casino boss, Nick Nicocropolis, out of business. In the wake of a bizarre and not entirely convincing series of events -- including the near-suicide of a big winner at the blackjack tables -- Valentine is hired to help save Nicocropolis' Acropolis hotel from ruin.

Valentine's other reason for being in Vegas is to find his ne'er-do-well son, Gerry, and help him get back on the right track. After failing in various of his own nefarious ventures, Gerry wants to join the family business. To this end, Valentine convinced his son to enroll in an underground graduate course in advance card counting, taught by a legendary Las Vegas shark.

Typically, though, Gerry screws up. In desperate need of a quick influx of money, he agrees to join a pair of Pakistani brothers -- his classmates -- in their scheme to scam thousands of dollars from Strip casinos. Unbeknownst to Gerry, though, one of the brothers is less interested in personal gain than financing an al Qaeda mission, and the FBI has only recently traced him to Las Vegas.

In less capable hands, Loaded Dice might have gotten hopelessly bogged down in the parallel storylines and a handful of other seemingly divergent subplots. Swain, though, maintains a very firm grip on the reins of his protagonist throughout the course of this very involving page-turner. Like fellow Florida writers Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Tom Corcoran and Laurence Shames, he is adept at balancing seriously warped characters with a truly engrossing narrative, and keeps everything within the ball park of plausibility. What Swain brings to the table, as well, is a bag overflowing with juicy anecdotes, some of which are too intricate to be invented merely for the amusement of mystery readers.

"As you know, blackjack is the favorite table game of every casino in the world," Valentine explains to the Sin's owners. "It is also, unfortunately, the game that's most susceptible to cheating. I personally know of a hundred ways to cheat at blackjack, and that doesn't include card-counting. That's why casinos monitor their blackjack tables so zealously.

"For every method of cheating at blackjack, casinos have devised a way to beat it. Computers, cameras, mirrors, daub, you name it, and the casinos have figured out a way to stop it. Then something called Deadlock appeared on the scene."

"'So it does exist,' one of the men exclaims.

"'That's right.'

"'You've seen it, or just heard about it?' Shelley asked.

"The challenge in his voice was unmistakable. Valentine could hear the soft purr of the cards being shuffled behind his back. 'I own one,' he replied"

Valentine goes on to detail the origin of the Deadlock machine, and how it could be used to bleed a casino into bankruptcy. Little does the ex-cop know how his consultation will come back to haunt him.

Loaded Dice took me little more than a single cross-country flight to finish. One of things that added to my enjoyment of it was knowing that Swain, unlike his protagonist, was banned from entering more than a few casinos along the Strip. In fact, at last year's Bouchercon, the annual mystery writers' get-together, security officials at the Riviera Hotel were instructed to escort the writer to his seminar on casino cheats and not take their eyes off the devices he demonstrated.