With a heart full of dreams, Sallie Coleman leaves Texas and heads west determined to get as far from the squalor of her dirt poor beginnings. With its shifting sands, smoky saloons and bingo palaces, Las Vegas seems like a paradise. A paradise where an extraordinary twist of fate makes Sallie the most powerful businesswoman in Nevada.
Suddenly she is rich. With the help of Philip Thornton, the handsome Bostonian, Sallie is transformed into Vegas's most elegant first lady. Philip gives her two sons, Simon and Ash. One will bring her great joy, the other, heartbreak.
Enter Fanny Logan. . . the small-town beauty from Pennsylvania who finds her destiny in Las Vegas, where she creates a multi-million dollar clothing empire and finds happiness and heartbreak as the wife of Ash Thornton, and the daughter Sallie never had. . . Ash Thornton, whose life centers around his greatest triumph - Babylon, the magnificent casino that will lead to his downfall. . . Simon Thornton, whose search for meaning takes him to the battlefields of World War II, the trading rooms of Wall Street and finally back to Nevada where he falls in love with the wife of his rival.
Fern Michaels creates another memorable family and series of books as she did with the Texas series - Texas Rich, Texas Heat, Texas Fury and Texas Sunrise.
In 1922, Sallie Coleman runs away from her poverty-stricken Texas home to Las Vegas, where a twist of fate makes her the richest and most powerful businesswoman in Nevada. As the Coleman family merges via marriage with the Thorton family, readers are drawn deeper into the glamour and heartbreak of Las Vegas. National media. HC: Kensington. (Fiction--Romance)
When, in 1922, Sallie Coleman, the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold, inherits a multimillion-dollar fortune from a recently deceased client, Las Vegas is in for a major shake-up. After Sallie hires a tutor, one Philip Thornton, from Boston, to "give her an education," she single-handedly transforms the dusty mining town into an entertainment mecca, building bingo palaces, becoming a lounge singer herself, even institutionalizing prostitution; before long, she is known as Mrs. Nevada. Along the way, Philip becomes her husband but never the love of her life—that role is reserved for her attorney, Devin Rollins, although she and Philip never divorce and he fathers her two sons, Ash and Simon—the first a conceited daddy's boy, the latter a humble genius with his mother's spunk and gumption. After WW II (both boys enlist secretly), Simon heads for New York, to make his fortune on Wall Street, while Ash stays at home in Vegas and marries Fanny Logan, a Pennsylvania girl who, in looks and personality, is a carbon copy of Sallie. The second and third generations of Thorntons further transform Vegas: Ash pours money into the creation of a mega-casino, Simon strives to maintain his mother's more cautious vision. Through it all, Sallie remains a matriarch to be reckoned with, but her twin grandsons, Sage and Birch, appear to be the future of Vegas . . . for better or worse.
Two more installments to go, with tie-ins to the Texas books. It's hard to imagine what more can befall this family, but if history doesn't lie, Michaels won't disappoint her fans, and she'll sell this trio like hotcakes, too.