From Publishers Weekly
Sex, lies, crushed dreams and slot machines are paramount in McGinniss's flashy, fast-moving debut. Chase is a struggling artist who couldn't hack NYU and moves back to Vegas, where he is reunited with his adolescent flame, Michele. After being fired from his teaching job for beating up a student, Chase plans to hook up with his girlfriend, Julia, in California, but instead spends his summer as a chauffeur for Michele's call-girl business. Michele has plans for herself (buying a house, getting an advanced degree in women's studies), but for the time being is running the call-girl service out of a suite in the Versailles Palace Hotel and Casino with her boyfriend, Bailey. Girls too young for the job, readily available cocaine, untrustworthy business partners, memories of a family tragedy and glammed-out Vegas goons make Chase's summer more stressful than he had hoped for as he attempts to finish a few paintings for a group gallery show. The novel is action-packed, though the character development—particularly with the women—is sometimes superficial. McGinniss (son of another Joe McGinnis you may have heard of) successfully gambles with the notion that whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what does that mean for Chase and his plans to escape?
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From the Publisher
"At first glance, this debut novel looks like a good, short read for the next time you're waiting at the airport. It's an insider's guide to the dark underbelly of twenty-first-century Las Vegas, brimming with brand names, hard bodies, hard drugs, and heavy doses of sex and violence. If that's all you're looking for,
The Delivery Man won't disappoint. . . . But once you finish it, you won't be able to get it out of your mind--McGinniss uses his fast-paced, B-movie plotline to explore how the flip side of the American dream can often be an inescapable nightmare, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald manipulated the melodrama of
The Great Gatsby. In fact,
The Delivery Man, like
Gatsby, is the story of a lost generation. While Fitzgerald's flappers danced as fast as they could before their world collapsed in Depression and war, McGinniss's losers are stranded in an empty landscape of dead sex, coked-out emotion, and pointless danger. To his credit, McGinniss refuses to take the easy, ironic way out favored by so many contemporary writers who distance the reader from the characters. You see these doomed, wretched people for what they are, and then McGinniss allows them to break your heart.
The Delivery Man is that rare first novel that could well become a classic." --Peter Bloch,
Penthouse "This debut novel from the son of the famed true-crime reporter is a searing portrait of young wastrels adrift in a vacuous Las Vegas. Chase couldn't cut it as an NYU art student and now finds himself mired in old, self-destructive patterns. Fired from his high-school teaching job following a fistfight with one of his students, he falls into a job chauffeuring a ring of teenage call girls to clients' homes. The ring is run by an old friend, an acquisitive Salvadoran immigrant who longs to buy a home in one of the ubiquitous new housing developments springing up in the desert. Although Chase is engaged to an ambitious business grad student and is himself struggling to finish a group of paintings for a gallery opening, he finds his sense of purpose draining away. Unsavory business partners and old vendettas soon come into fast and furious play. McGinniss never wavers from his ruthless portrayal of the morally bankrupt, and some readers may be put off by the unlikable characters, but this atmospheric page-turner gains increasing depth as it barrels toward a gut-wrenching conclusion." --Joanne Wilkinson,
Booklist
