Las Vegas
Las Vegas is a city of contradictions dressed in sequins, and the book leans into every one of them.
It's blazing hot during the day — desert heat that slaps Sophie in the face the second she steps off the jet and has her makeup threatening mutiny — and then shockingly cold at night, leaving her shivering in a bandage dress outside a steakhouse with no coat because Mim thinks outerwear would ruin their "look.
" It's a city of spectacle layered over grit: the glittering casino-laden Strip with its Bellagio fountains and high-roller restaurants gives way to the darker suburban streets just a few turns off the main drag, where the bright lights vanish and everything feels grittier and more honest. The novel uses that geographic slide — from neon to nondescript — as a narrative engine.
The team eats tiny pretentious morsels at a Scandinavian fine-dining spot on the Strip, then scarfs fast-food burgers in the car because nobody's actually full.
They sip champagne at a cabaret show inside Body Shots, a venue that feels like a seduction in architectural form — tufted burgundy leather, smoky low light, spotlit red velvet curtains — and then end up tailing a suspect through a fast-food drive-thru into the Gateway District.
The real Vegas in this book isn't the Strip; it's the Arts District, where murals cover every surface and a dead man's last memory leads to a painted woman's face on the wall of a nondescript beige office building.
It's the suburbs where a bear clan runs a hunting-lodge steakhouse surrounded by desert gravel and succulents — a mountain cabin aesthetic plopped into an arid landscape that somehow works. It's an Indian restaurant run by a giant prophetic birdwoman hiding behind a carved door depicting the goddess Annapurna.
Las Vegas here is the perfect mission city: loud enough to hide in, flashy enough to make their fake high-roller cover story plausible, and seedy enough underneath that an illegal shifter fight ring can operate in a basement while the rest of the city doesn't blink.
The dichotomy is the point — it's a place where Sophie can play arm candy in stilettos and shapewear one hour and then stand over unconscious criminals in a knockout-gas-filled building the next, staring at a dead man's murderer's shoes.
