The Lucky

The streets of early Las Vegas are a tough place for a boy to grow up. Pete Elkins is fatherless, living in a cramped apartment with his mother, a party-girl with a penchant for falling in love with the wrong kind of man, and his older sister, grown up too young from trying to parent both her brother and their feckless mother. Pete is headed for serious trouble when he is befriended by Willy Bobbins, a casino owner with a murky past and even murkier business practices. But Willy is also deeply compassionate and wise, and he soon becomes a surrogate father for the lonely Pete. Gradually, Pete becomes involved with Willy's troubled family and comes to know both the scope of his mentor's power and the depth of his vulnerabilities.

The Lucky is a powerful novel about growing up, moving from mob-dominated Las Vegas to Willy's beloved Montana ranch--which hides secrets of its own--to the battlefields of Vietnam. But the novel's greatest strength lies in its vivid and unforgettable characters--casino workers and entertainers, cowboys, soldiers, petty criminals, spoiled rich kids, thrill-seekers, and the hopeless, helpless poor. And most of all, the colorful, enigmatic, and ultimately tragic figure of Willy Bobbins, a man who helped build Las Vegas but instead lost himself along the way.

About the Author
H. Lee Barnes, a native Westerner born in Idaho and reared in five Western states, resides in Southern Nevada where he teaches English and creative writing to college students. He is the author of Dummy Up and Deal: Inside the Culture of Casino Dealing and Gunning for Ho: Vietnam Stories, which was a finalist for the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is also the recipient of the Willamette Fiction Award and the Arizona Authors Association Fiction Award.