When his father, a gambling addict, racks up more than $2.5 million in debt to murderous loan sharks, Bobby bets the lives of his family on a dice roll in Penn Jillette's Random, a darkly comedic thriller of happenstance. Twenty-year-old Bobby Ingersoll loves his job driving an advertising truck along the Las Vegas Strip. His complacency comes to a screeching halt when he learns his father owes a tremendous debt to Fraser Ruphart, an evil loan shark. If someone doesn't pay Ruphart, Bobby will die--and so will his sister and mother.
Bobby begs, borrows and steals to get the cash, but he's nowhere near the amount needed when the loan comes due. Distraught, Bobby wanders into a notoriously dangerous neighborhood and into the middle of a gangbanger shoot-out. A big bag of money ends up in Bobby's hands. It's still not enough to help his family, but Bobby's inspired. He bets all of it at a casino and the outcome gives him a new life path: the way of Random. Everything Bobby decides from that moment forward will be determined by a dice roll. Bad guys don't take kindly to winners in Vegas unless they get a cut of the action. Bobby's newfound religion creates hellacious, madcap complications but could be the very thing that saves him.
Jillette (God, No!) writes with the same irreverent and bawdy sense of humor he employs in his magician-comedy act with Teller, of Penn and Teller. It might be an acquired taste, but Jillette is an undeniably talented writer and makes Random palatable by wrapping the story in a higher philosophical truth. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer