LAY THE FAVORITE

LAY THE FAVORITE is a wild ride through the high-stakes sports gambling underworld, as seen through the eyes of a young woman who had come to Las Vegas hoping to land a job as a cocktail waitress and instead found herself seduced by the adrenaline-fueled, high risk/high reward gambler's life, and the complicated, funny, sexy, dangerous, rule-breaking roguish types who became her mentors, her enemies, and her family. Beth Raymer brings to life a world that teems with pathos and ecstasy in this wild picaresque that also tells the story of a young woman's crazy, sexy, most unlikely coming-of-age.

Beth Raymer arrived in Las Vegas in 2001, hoping to land a job as a cocktail waitress at one of the big casinos on the Strip. She lived in a cheap motel with her dog Otis and waited tables at a Thai restaurant when one of her customers recommended her for a job. Beth soon found herself interviewing with a big-time professional sports gambler named Dink who was looking for a right-hand man: someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn't steal. Beth got the job.

LAY THE FAVOURITE is the story of Beth Raymer's four years working in the testosterone-filled, high-stakes, sports betting underworld a time that coincides with a period of great change in the betting industry: the fall of the local bookie and the rise of the offshore sportsbook and with it the elevation of sports betting in popular culture. As the business moves from the relatively known world of land-locked betting parlours to the free-wheeling, unregulated waters of the Caribbean, Beth too rises from assistant to "figures girl" to expert trusted and seasoned enough to open an offshore booking office in Curaçao with a couple of cohorts. She spent another year in the Wild West of Curaçao, riding the highs and lows of the business, before deciding the life wasn't for her, and opting out.

Beth Raymer is a natural storyteller, a funny, charming woman fully awake to the ironies of her situation, but also a compassionate and astute observer of the adrenalin-addicted, tragi-comic personalities that populate this world all of whom come to life vividly on the page. In addition its great cast of Soprano-esque characters, LAY THE FAVOURITE has its fair share of drama and deception everything you might expect from the lifestyle she chronicles. And it has romance: Beth hires a young business reporter to work as her accomplice, and ends up marrying him!

Beth Raymer is a firecracker, a one-of-a-kind author: She has worked as a social worker, an in-home stripper, an assistant to a professional gambler, an offshore bookmaker, and a Golden Gloves boxer, before getting an MFA from Columbia and winning a Fulbright Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

Spiegel & Grau have another work from Raymer already under contract: SWEETHEART DEALS, a debut novel loosely based on the author’s own childhood. (Tentative publication Summer 2013)