The House Always Wins

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.

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.