The Ballad of a Small Player

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<p><i><b>I waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling it was going to be a Natural, a perfect nine.</b></i></p><p><b>His name is Lord Doyle.</b> <b></b> <b>His plan: to gamble away his last days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau.</b> <b></b> <b>His game:<i>baccarat punto blanco</i>-- 'that slutty dirty queen of casino card games.'</b></p><p>Though Doyle is not a Lord at all. He is a fake; a corrupt lawyer who has spent a career siphoning money from rich clients. And now he is on the run, determined to send the money and himself up in smoke.</p><p>So begins a beguiling, elliptical velvet rope of a plot: a sharp suit, yellow kid gloves, another<i>naughty lemonade</i>and an endless loop of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful yet enigmatic lost soul, so begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak in which millions come Doyles way. But in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, Doyle knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are even greater.</p><p><i>The Ballad of a Small Player</i>is a sleek, dark-hearted masterpiece: a ghost story set in the land of the living, and a decadent morality tale of a Faustian pact made, not with the devil, but with fortunes fickle hand.</p>

Autorenportrait

Born in England,<b>Lawrence Osborne</b>is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark and<i>Beautiful Animals.</i>His non-fiction ranges from memoir through travelogue to essays, including<i>Bangkok Days</i>,<i>Paris Dreambook</i>and<i>The Wet and the Dry.</i>His short story 'Volcano' was selected for<i>Best American Short Stories 2012,</i>and he has written<i></i>for the<i>New York Times Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler,</i>the<i>New Yorker, Forbes, Harpers</i>and other publications. He lives in Bangkok.

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