Book excerpt: TO VEGAS and BACK is Casino meets The Burning Bed, peppered with The Glass Castle. The story begins with a twenty-six-year-old woman living the American dream in the 1960s. She was a homemaker and mother of three in the beautiful suburbs of Philadelphia. At thirty-two she gets a divorce and trades brownies and carpools for pasties and feathers as a Showgirl in Las Vegas. In a nutshell, this woman leaves her husband in 1972 and is swooped up by a rich man who wants to make her a showgirl. He moves her to Vegas and shortly after, he is murdered. Distraught, she is visited by the FBI to learn her deceased friend was a crook and ran a Ponzi scheme. She then meets a Vegas mobster who introduces her into the world of sex, drugs and the underground workings of Vegas casinos. She realizes her dream when she nails an audition and becomes one of the most sought-after showgirls of her time in the Tropicana's famous Les Folies Bergere. Finally, this woman meets a man who wants to marry her and take in her children-a man who nearly destroys them with violence, alcohol and abuse over the course of six years. The author can tell this story firsthand, because this woman is her mother.