It's 1996 and Dolly Leone the gambler owes his bookmaker. What can he do to get Greenie's crazy goons off his back: Twitchy, who suffers from Reverse Tourette's Syndrome, and Billy, who is big and wide as a piano and who loves to sing show tunes as he breaks down doors.

Luckily, Dolly stumbles across a manuscript called Pasquale's Wager, written in 1982 by Valentino Comfort, aka The Schoolboy. Dolly and Val were part of a blackjack team financed by Pasquale, the big money restaurateur who took a group of misfits and turned them into high-stakes professional card players--though still misfits. Back then, Dolly came up with a plan for Val to write a best-seller about the team's adventure: Casinos, big money, danger and risk. He figured it was a can't-miss proposition.

Now Dolly, belatedly discovering the longlost manuscript, heads for LA to pitch Pasquale's Wager and rake in money from book and movie deals. Along the way, as he dodges the thugs, he manages to read Schoolboy's book for the first time: Reno, Tahoe, Vegas, Monte Carlo, and Sun City in South Africa. Val has gotten the locations right--but the story isn't quite what Dolly expected. Though he has to admit, Val brings to life a cast of gamblers and casino bosses, cardsharps and boneheads--and maybe even a genius. That would be Tess, also called The Teaser, who brought the blackjack team their secret weapon against the house--a computer that counts cards with superhuman precision. And, of course, the way you sneak a computer into a casino is-- Well, it's all in Val's book.

And there's more in the book than Dolly expected. For one thing, Val knows a dark secret that Dolly thought he had covered up. The good news, though, is that Dolly has tracked down an agent. And the better news is that so far there's no Val anywhere in sight with whom to share the windfall.