What Really Happens in Vegas: True Stories of the People Who Make Vegas, Vegas

In this splashy group portrait, Patterson (Obsessed) and Seal (Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli), a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, spotlight the “unseen toiling armies of personnel” who make Sin City run. Among the profile subjects are Raymond Torres, who served 18 years in prison before becoming one of Las Vegas’s most trusted chauffeurs to the stars, and “high-end sex worker” Dixie, whose clients are high rollers often seeking “companionship disguised as sex.” Elsewhere, Patterson and Seal recount how interior designer Roger Thomas helped elevate Vegas from scruffy gambling outpost to dazzling fantasyland when he designed the Bellagio for casino owner Steve Wynn in 1998, and chronicle “Wedding Queen of the West” Charolette Richards’s journey from lonely wife and mother who arrived in Las Vegas in 1959 to pioneer of the drive-through wedding and the Elvis Presley Pink Cadillac ceremony. Focusing primarily on Horatio Alger–like rags-to-riches stories, the authors downplay the city’s dark side but keep things uptempo, vivid, and fun. Vegas fans are in for an entertaining ride. (Dec.)