The House Always Wins: A Vegas Ghost Story

Anna Christiansen's small-town life is about to go haywire. A young reporter stuck in a dead-end job, Anna falls head over heels for an interview subject, the bass player in an up-and-coming alt band. In short order, she pulls up stakes, moves to Las Vegas, gets married and pregnant, and moves into a big fixer-upper haunted by the ghost of a Sin City racketeer. That's when she gets notice from a corrupt casino owner that he's buying up all the properties on her street to make way for a parking lot. But Anna has poured her heart and soul into the house, and digs in hard to fight the system, not the easiest of tasks in a city where bribery, mayhem, and murder are standard operating procedures. Can Anna's tough-guy ghost provide the help she needs to prevail in this dangerous cat-and-mouse game? Will Anna's life be left in ruins? Or worse? Part road trip, part coming-of-age saga, part mystery, part ghost story, The House Always Wins is all Vegas.

author of the

A love story. Vegas. A house with deadly secrets. Brian Rouff does it again with The House Always Wins. -- Gretchen Archer ― author of the Davis Way Crime Caper Series From its quintessentially Vegas title to its rewarding ending, The House Always Wins is the story of young love, a cross-country road trip, a haunted house, and a war with a corrupt casino owner--all captured with the depth and detail only a genuine Las Vegas insider can deliver. Brian Rouff weaves past and present seamlessly in this unique tale with a Vegas ghost so real you won't have any choice but to believe. -- Megan Edwards ― author of Getting off on Frank Sinatra Anna Christiansen takes on City Hall in this gripping Sin City story. Her mission in The House Always Wins is a classic tale that's equally suspenseful, well-written, and memorable. Author Brian Rouff keeps the pages turning as he pulls out all the stops in his latest Las Vegas novel. -- Cathy Scott ― author of Murder of a Mafia Daughter and The Killing of Tupac Shakur, journalist and blogger Las Vegas is a city of ghosts. Some apparitions haunt its mobbed-up past. Others seem to walk among us. Author Brian Rouff understands Las Vegas and its ghosts better than most, and it shows in his latest novel, The House Always Wins. It’s entertaining and intriguing and will make a great addition to your Las Vegas bookshelf. -- John L. Smith ― author of Of Rats and Men and Even a Street Dog Las Vegas may be overexposed, but Rouff, as usual, finds a fresh angle. His mobster ghost story is funny and poignant and contains inside intel on Vegas that only a longtime resident could mine. -- Matthew O’Brien ― author of Beneath the Neon Brian Rouff’s The House Always Wins features a plucky heroine who blindly leaps at love, finds a new home, and, in fighting for both, finds herself. Love with a bit of intrigue, wrapped in humor, and tied with a bow of Las Vegas magic, the story is a delight! -- Deborah Coonts

Kirkus Reviews

“Lucky O’Toole” Vegas adventure series Gripping, adventurous, and romantic, this witty read will keep you guessing and give a glimpse into the real world of Las Vegas, one that Rouff is clearly familiar with. Scary, good fun. -- Constance Ford ― author of Little Bird The House Always Wins is a fun ride through Vegas old and new where the underworld meets the afterlife. From prenatal care to departed gangsters, there's a little bit of everything in here. -- David G. Schwartz ― author of Tales from the Pit: Casino Table Games Managers in Their Own Words A page-turner with a humorous twist you won’t want to put down. -- Morgan St. James ― author of A Corpse in the Soup The House Always Wins rings true of old time Las Vegas. Oddly built one-of-a-kind homes? Check. Dead mobster haunting the place? Check. Over-reaching casino owner taking more than he’s entitled to? Yeah, it’s Vegas, baby! -- H. G. McKinnis ― author of A Justified Bitch Brian Rouff’s latest, The House Always Wins, is a masterful piece that takes the reader down a serpentine path leading to a chilling finish that surprises and delights. Like his other books, it captures the spirit of Las Vegas and keeps the reader in suspense throughout an engrossing story. -- Marc David ― author of 1,001 Things You Didn’t Want to Know A whirlwind romance leads an unlikely pair of newlyweds to Las Vegas, home of every dream and nightmare they can imagine―from predatory developers to a friendly ghost. Rouff spins a guilelessly winsome fable whose charming heroine needs to have everything from her ghost’s personal history to the ritual significance of her newborn’s bris explained to her―which means that the reader gets treated to all these explanations too.

author of Gangsterland

Rouff has a chance to be to Vegas what Carl Hiaasen is to Florida. -- Tod Goldberg

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I awoke in the blackness of night with a song in my head. It happens more than you’d think. Messages bubbling up from deep in the tar pits of our subconscious, biological emails we block or ignore or tamp down during the day, but that scurry in like termites when the lights go out and our guards come down. In this instance, the lyric came from the Talking Heads classic “Once in a Lifetime”: “And you may tell yourself/This is not my beautiful house …” Just a fragment, but enough to concern me, because later in the song I remembered it says: “My God, what have I done?” This would require some analysis, because on the surface, at least, I was happy. I loved Aaron more than ever, I loved my “beautiful house” that we were bringing back to life with our own four hands (mostly), and I loved the life we were building. So where the heck did the doubt come from? Sure, I experienced random pangs of homesickness; ironic because, when I left Scandia, I was literally sick of home. But nothing to prompt this. I stared at the nothingness before me, feeling around the unrumpled sheets on Aaron’s side of the bed, a sign he hadn’t yet returned from his recently procured lounge gig. Perhaps the answer was as simple as loneliness (mixed with a dash of isolation); just the big old house and me still getting to know each other. I chewed on that possibility for a moment as the sounds of the night encroached: a siren, a car horn, a barking dog, a train whistle. Plus, the usual creaks and moans typical of middle-aged structures (and people). A melancholy chorus if ever there was one. I pulled the covers up higher and shuddered. Could I dare hope for a second round of blessed sleep? The beginning of my second trimester was making it more and more unlikely these days. But as the warmth and oblivion enveloped me, another sound made its presence felt, tiptoeing around the threadbare outer edges of my consciousness. Barely present at first, indistinguishable from a dream, but then muffled, like your parents’ murmurs from behind closed doors. It required my absolute concentration to will it into focus, the way you’d adjust the dials on a telescope to bring a distant celestial body into crystalline view. It was as annoying as walking with a grain of sand in your shoe; try as I might, I could not ignore it. And so I threw back the blanket and slipped into my robe, cinching it tight at what passed for my waist. Could I have left the TV on before going to bed? I clearly remembered turning it off, although my memory wasn’t what it used to be, the growing alien in my tummy stealing my mojo by the day. Stupidly, I flicked on the light and set off to find the source of the babble, not stopping to think it could be burglars or worse. A downstairs room-to-room inspection yielded nothing. But as I got closer to the stairs (all 17 of them), I noticed a second element added to the mix: the faint, but unmistakably pungent, aroma of cigar smoke. A smart woman would have called 911. But what would I say? I hear a TV and smell a cigar. Please send your crack SWAT team immediately. Instead, I made my way to the kitchen and grabbed a rubber mallet from the rack, the kind you use to pound chicken. (I know, Aaron, not a euphemism.) I’m sure the sight was laughable; a pregnant woman awkwardly wielding a cooking utensil certain to strike terror in the heart of any home invader. I stopped to catch my breath on the upstairs landing before completing my ascent and moving methodically down the long hall, poking my head into each room to―what? Assure myself it was all a figment of my overripe imagination? Was that really preferable to an actual intruder? The hammering of my own heart was the only sound I heard.

About the Author

Brian Rouff knows where the bodies are buried. Born in Detroit and raised in Southern California, Rouff has lived in Las Vegas since 1981, which makes him a long-timer by local standards. When he's not writing articles, screenplays, and Las Vegas-based insider novels such as Dice Angel and Money Shot, he runs Imagine Communications, a marketing and public relations firm in Henderson, Nevada. On a personal note, Brian is married with two daughters and five grandchildren.

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