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| Grift Sense | 
| Author: James Swain
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 108965
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0345463838
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780345463838
ASIN: 0345463838
Publication Date: April 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, July 2001: The first four pages of this casino-themed debut are smashing--literally. Then James Swain, himself a gambling expert and professional magician, gets to the real story, and at that point, the plot starts churning out more twists than a corkscrew factory on overtime. Soon the characters are so enmeshed in their own self-serving lies, scams, and schemes that the only thing for a reader to do is just take a deep breath and let the steady barrage of surprises wash over him. There's no point in saying "take a deep breath and enjoy the scenery," because in Swain's Las Vegas, what one gazes upon is most likely to be a casino's gambling floor as viewed from security monitors. "Watching surveillance videos," he explains, "is a unique experience. The cameras filtered twice as much light as the human eye, and as a result hairpieces looked like rugs, cheap suits took on zebra stripes, and women wearing red dresses became naked. It was like entering the Twilight Zone." All too familiar with this eerie, totally paranoid, 24/7 universe is one-time Atlantic City cop Tony Valentine, who now runs a one-man consulting business he calls Grift Sense. To say of someone that he has that particular form of larcenous intuition, the author tells us, is "the highest compliment" one hustler can pay another. Grift sense means "that you not only knew how to do the moves, you also knew when to do them." And even if Valentine is 62 and settled in Florida, away from the action, he's never lost his ability to "feel when a hustle's going down, even if (he doesn't) know exactly what it is." That's why the Acropolis Resort & Casino is determined to lure him West to check out what looks like funny business going on between blond blackjack dealer Nola Briggs and a player named Frank Fontaine, who happens to be winning a little too steadily. Swain's easy expertise with the world of gaming and gamblers makes Grift Sense into a fascinating guidebook, as well as a vivid debut in a series that so far has a flavor all its own. --Otto Penzler
Product Description
Amidst the neon and the big special ugly of Las Vegas, mild-mannered Frank Fontaine is beating the brains out of the Acropolis Casino. The house cops think the dealer, a blonde named Nola, is part of the con, but no one can prove a thing. For Tony Valentine, it’s the first new scam he’s seen in decades—and maybe the best. Three things Tony knows: The blonde is guilty, the grifter has lived a former life, and the biggest scam is the one that hasn’t happened yet.
In a dream world of fake Greek statues, statuesque hostesses, and a casino owner whose sex life might just burn down his own house, Tony Valentine is plying his special trade. While some people have a sixth sense, Tony has a grift sense—and he needs it now to separate a grifter from a scam that’s worse than anyone’s wildest dreams. . . .
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| Customer Reviews: Read 47 more reviews...
 Great Series Kick-Off May 8, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Retired cop turned crime consultant Tony Valentine lives quietly in Florida while doing freelance work for casinos, helping them catch cheats. To avoid his estranged son Gerry, he accepts a job at the aging Acropolis on the Vegas Strip, where casino owner Nick Nicocropolis is sure he's being ripped off by a hustler and possibly one of his dealers. The hustler walks, but the casino has blackjack dealer Nola Briggs arrested, sure she's involved, though they need Valentine to help prove it.
The first thing Valentine has to do is identify the hustler now going by the name Frank Fontaine. After checking his database and reviewing other clues, he thinks it can be no other than the legendary Sonny Fontana, his personal nemesis, who supposedly had his head crushed in a car door several years earlier. The waters get muddied further when the lawyer Nola hires has a grudge against Fontana/Fontaine and hires a thug to take him out. Meanwhile, interesting details about Nola's past relationship with both Sonny Fontana and Nick Nicocropolis come to light. Just as things in Vegas heat up worse than the desert at midday, Valentine's son goes missing, most likely the victim of Fontana's thugs. Torn between a need to run to his son's aid and his need to take down Sonny Fontana for good before he can bankrupt the Acropolis, Tony finds himself in the thick of things as he figures out Sonny Fontana's complex plan to rip off the casino. And all along, one question hangs in the air: is Nola guilty?
When I first started the book, I found it enjoyable, but was ready to relegate it to just one more mystery series with a twist. However, Swain's characters won me over. There is more going on here than just a series mystery that happens to be set in Las Vegas with a gambling backdrop. Instead, it's more like a romp through Sin City with its quirky locals while Valentine unravels a convoluted set of clues, at the same time he ponders his rocky relationship with his son, his friendship with his next-door neighbor Mabel, and wonders if he's ready to move on to a new relationship with a woman after the death of his wife, since lovely Roxanne at the front desk of the Acropolis starts making some overt moves.
When it's all said and done, Valentine wraps up the mystery and makes some headway with his personal issues. Valentine himself is quite a likeable character with not only street smarts, but what he calls "grift sense," an ability to sense a con even when he's not even quite sure what it is. The other characters are a mishmash of witty old ladies, cops, security experts, scumbags, and just ordinary people going about living their lives. For a mystery series slightly different than the norm, Tony Valentine is your man.
 1st in the Tony Valentine series beats the house May 22, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Crime
By MARILYN STASIO
Published: July 8, 2001
Have you heard the one about the canny granny who won a pot of money by card-counting on her rosary beads? How about the mother-and-son team whose method of palming cards at the blackjack table was ''pure poetry''? And what about the sweet techniques of guys like Jake the Snake and Larry the Lightbulb? James Swain, who came to his expertise on gambling hustles by way of his skills as a sleight-of-hand magician, uses the crooked play of these inspired cheats
to pull us into GRIFT SENSE (Pocket Books, [...]), a flashy, funny novel about a cool [...] to break the bank at a Las Vegas casino.
When Nick Nicocropolis gets wind that someone is out to bring down his establishment, the grandly named but barely solvent Acropolis, he does the smart thing by calling in Tony Valentine, an ex-cop with a nose for a good grift. ''I can feel when a hustle's going down, even if I don't know exactly what it is,'' says Tony, who tests his instinct against his database of some 5,000 known hustlers and comes up with the profile of a dead man. (So much for science.) Although it's slightly maddening to watch Tony conducting off-the-premises research when he could be walking us through some of the other swindles going down on the casino floor, Swain knows how to misdirect the eye during the deal.
 Strong and confident November 28, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
...describes the writing in this first of a series. Very well done with insider knowledge.
Tony Valentine's great little retirement gig October 30, 2005
Grift Sense is the first of what has now become a series of five Tony Valentine novels by author James Swain (currently working on book six). I read Swain's latest, Mr. Lucky, first, and it was good enough to cause me to go back and start at the beginning. And Grift Sense was not a disappointment either. Swain is a talented and very imaginative writer who has carved out a nice little niche of a storyline that is timely and fits in well with the current popularity of casino and televised poker tournaments.
Swain's main character in all his books is Tony Valentine, a retired Atlantic City cop, living in Palm Harbor, Florida. In Grift Sense Swain explains how Tony got his start as a consultant to the casinos and how he established his reputation as THE authoritative source for ferreting out those headline grabbing gambling scams that can ruin a casino.
In Grift Sense, Tony receives an overnight package containing video security tapes from the Acropolis, an older Vegas casino. Seems a stranger had taken the same blackjack dealer for more than $50,000 over a period of a couple days, and the only plausible explanation is cheating. No one on the security staff was able to spot how the player had cheated and so they turned to Tony. Recognizing the potential this scam has for ruining the Acropolis, Tony agrees to help and hops the next first class flight to Vegas. As the story plays out, Tony discovers he is on the trail of one of the most hated and feared scam artists of all time, and someone that everyone had thought was dead.
Swain leads the reader into a house of mirrors with twists and turns as unexpected as they ingenious. Grift Sense is as entertaining as it is enlighteningly educational. Sure to be enjoyed by everyone who likes a good mystery. My lone complaint about this book and the other Swain book I read is that it is hard not to pull for the scam artist who is sticking it to the casinos, after all, whoever heard of the casinos being lumped in with the good guys?
The First Tony Valentine Novel October 24, 2005
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I don't personally read a lot of mysteries, usually only those where I'm drawn to the subject matter or setting. Such was the case with Grift Sense: a setting of Las Vegas, casinos, and gambling grabbed my interest and this book found its way onto my shelf. When I eventually got around to starting this book, I was hooked almost instantly.
Grift Sense is the first foray into the mystery genre by gambling expert James Swain. Swain is able to use this expertise to set-up some seemingly ingenious scams and to show us the inner workings of casino security. Swain's protagonist is one Tony Valentine, a retired Atlantic City cop with a wealth of experience dealing with casino scammers. He is now putting this experience to use working as a security consultant for various casinos across the country. This case he gets sucked into draws him out of his complacent Florida retirement into the heart of the action in Las Vegas. From there it's nonstop twists and turns until the final showdown with the bad guys. Swain does an excellent job of keeping the plot moving and keeping you guessing right up to the end.
As far as characters go, Swain does a good job of assembling a fun cast of interesting characters. Tony comes across well as the experienced investigator who is always a couple of steps ahead of everyone else. Mabel Struck is Tony's slightly eccentric neighbor who evidently gets her kicks running prank ads in the classifieds. I could see some kind of relationship eventually developing between her and Tony. Once Tony gets to Vegas, we meet several other interesting characters including the seedy, womanizing casino owner and his slightly incompetent head of security, a potential love interest who works the hotels front desk, and of course the bad guy.
Overall this is a fun, fast mystery and a great start to a new series. Recommended to any mystery buff or to anyone into Las Vegas and casino gambling. Also, look for the other Tony Valentine mysteries: Funny Money, Sucker Bet, Loaded Dice, and Mr. Lucky.
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