Ballad of a Small Player – Osborne Lawrence (2015)

Soon to be a major Netflix film starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton, this novel follows Lord Doyle, who plans to gamble away his final days in the dark and decadent casino halls of Macau. His game is baccarat punto blanco, which he calls the slutty, dirty queen of casino card games. But Doyle is not a lord at all. He is a fraud: a corrupt lawyer who has spent his career siphoning money from wealthy clients. Now on the run, he is determined to send both the money and himself up in smoke. The result is a beguiling, elliptical plot of sharp suits, yellow kid gloves, illicit lemonades and an endless cycle of small wins and losses. When Lady Luck arrives in the form of Dao-Ming, a beautiful and enigmatic lost soul, Doyle begins a spectacular and unnatural winning streak, and millions come his way. Yet in these shadowy dens of risk and compulsion, in a land governed by superstition, he knows that when the bets are high, the stakes are higher still. This is a sleek, dark-hearted ghost story set in the land of the living and a decadent morality tale about a Faustian pact made not with the devil, but with fortune’s fickle hand.