It's the hair-raising countdown to a new millennium, and Cosmo Dust watches in dismay as the wreckage of his life comes into garish focus in the phantasmagoric glow of Las Vegas. Abandoned by his wife-whose death via a poisoned Easter egg has flummoxed Cosmo's sense of a moral universe-he is spending his days frescoing a faux Sistine Chapel ceiling and flirting with the myriad opportunities Vegas offers for self-annihilation.

When a seductive femme fatale and a minxish, trick-turning cocktail waitress simultaneously barge into Cosmo's misery, he finds his world-and the world-turned inside out. Suddenly he's a murder suspect, a foster father, a fugitive hunted by both the Jewish and Italian Mafiosi, and the unlikely partner of a woman whose identity becomes more inscrutable with each passing day. Is she Annunciata D'Angelo, daughter of the late Pope John Paul I; Ann D'Angelo, daughter of a dying mob despot; or just Susan Kane, plain jane from Darlington, Wisconsin? And does it matter? Cosmo and…let's call her Ann…must escape the clutches of the cops, the bad guys, the coming apocalypse, the tendency for all things Vegas to spiral toward entropy, and-most importantly of all-their own pasts, if they are to have any hope of creating new lives in a new world.

It's safe to say that this metaphysical shimmy through Cosmo's cosmos, complete with anti-earths, multiple messiahs, and capricious dark forces playing yo-yo with fate, is unlike anything you've read before. This guide is designed to enhance your reading group's discussion of The Madonna of Las Vegas.