It is 1955 in Las Vegas. Sammy and Satchmo are headlining the big hotels - where the casino operators and the color bar say a black man can't buy a drink or a meal or a room. Until now. The Chicago mob man Mo Weiner is bankrolling ex-boxer Worthless Worthington Lee and the city's first all-black hotel-casino. The Ivory Coast is rising up from the dust, on the wrong side of town. And out of the shadows steps Deacon, a white horn player with a dark past and a genius for jazz. Mo mistakes him for a hitman. Worthless takes him for a friend. Anita, the mixed-race beauty he falls for, wants him for herself. And Haney, the corrupt and racist copy who runs this hot desert oasis of sin and sand, wants him rubbed out. Deacon is holding a dangerous hand, and a dangerous secret, spun inside a deadly web of deceit and double-crosses. The Ivory Coast is coming, rushing this sprawling drama toward the last Sunday in May, when the whole town will be black and white and blood-red all over... A suspenseful first novel of remarkable imagination, scope and energy, The Ivory Coast is impossible to ignore and, once begun, impossible to resist. Just in time for the remake of Ocean's Eleven , here is an entertaining debut thriller about Las Vegas in the Rat Pack glory years. In Fleming's story, however, the focus is not on the Strip, where Frank, Dean, and Sammy cavorted, but on the city's West Side, where Vegas' first all-black casino, the Ivory Coast, is set to open. The casino's front man, a business-savvy former boxer, fears trouble from Vegas' top cop, Haney, a notorious racist. Meanwhile, Deacon, a Chet Baker-like trumpet player, finds himself in possession of a suitcase full of photos exposing Haney's kinky side. The suitcase, the kinky cop, and an underage truck-stop waitress soon embroil Deacon in a many-sided plot whose various strands come together on the casino's opening night. Despite a clumsy ending in which Fleming has trouble connecting all his dots, this is a thoroughly engaging tale in which the historical elements are nicely integrated into the action. For more on black Las Vegas in the '50s, see Bill Moody's Death of a Tenor Man (1995). Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Charles Fleming is a veteran entertainment industry reporter and the author of High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess. The Ivory Coast is his first novel.