The Princess of Las Vegas by Chris Bohjalian
👑 The Princess of Las Vegas by Chris Bohjalian — A Sparkly Start with a Dull Finish
Genre: Thriller / Suspense
Rating: ⭐⭐½ (2.5 out of 5)
Vibe: Sin City meets The Parent Trap, with crypto crimes and impersonator drama
Length: 320 pages that start strong… and slowly fizzle
Tone: Glitzy and promising, but loses steam and logic along the way
✨ First Impressions
I really wanted to love this one. It had all the right ingredients: glitz, crime, mistaken identity, a Diana impersonator working at a faux-Buckingham Palace casino in Vegas (how fun is that premise?), a math-whiz foster kid, and a sinister crypto empire with connections to every corrupt person this side of Capitol Hill. What could go wrong?
Answer: the pacing. The logic. And, well, the whole second half.
🎭 The Setup: Two Sisters and a Royal Act
Meet Crissy Dowling, a woman so committed to her job as a Princess Diana impersonator, she literally got a nose job for it. She performs nightly at Buckingham Palace—a low-rent casino just off the Vegas Strip that sounds like the kind of place where the carpets are sticky and the slot machines still take coins.
Her younger sister, Betsy, lives in Vermont and has just adopted a brilliant 13-year-old foster kid named Marisa, who happens to be a tech prodigy-slash-hacker. Betsy is scraping by as a social worker until she meets Frankie Limback, a suspiciously generous rich guy with charming vibes and… a whole lot of shady crypto money.
Naturally, they all end up in Vegas. Because nothing ever goes wrong when you uproot your life and move across the country with a man who hands out cash like candy.
🧨 The Crime: Crypto, Casinos, and Cliffside Corpses
Frankie works for Futurium, a shady crypto outfit that may or may not have mafia ties (they do). Futurium wants to buy the Buckingham Palace casino, but the current owners, Artie and Richie, refuse. So... Futurium does the only logical thing: they kill both brothers, stage the murders as suicides, and buy the place anyway. I mean, why negotiate when you have hitmen and hush money?
The hitman in question is Yevgeny, a mysterious Russian guy dating Crissy. Of course. But then plot twist: Yevgeny is actually working for the FBI. When Futurium finds out, they have him killed too. And in a twist I still don’t fully understand, they frame Crissy by dressing Betsy up like her and placing her near the crime scene.
At this point, the whole thing starts reading like a soap opera where every twist just raises more questions than answers.
👩💻 Enter Marisa: The Real MVP
Meanwhile, Marisa gets kidnapped by Frankie, because that’s what you do when you're a crypto mobster in a thriller. She’s a genius though, so she hacks into Frankie’s Wi-Fi using an iPad (with no password access, because apparently mobsters don’t believe in network security) and sends Crissy a digital SOS.
Crissy races to save her but ends up kidnapped too, because in this book, people are being tied up more than plot threads.
At Frankie’s house, everyone’s losing their minds:
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Betsy is being forced to transfer all her crypto to Futurium,
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Marisa has already moved the funds elsewhere (obviously),
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Lara, a political campaign manager (and secret FBI agent) gets shot by Rory, another goon,
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Crissy hurls a vase,
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Betsy shoots Rory, and
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The police finally show up, casually late as always.
💔 Family Drama and Confessions
Crissy and Betsy finally confront the dark trauma between them—their mother's suicide, which Crissy always blamed on Betsy. But we learn the truth: their mom died by suicide after learning her husband (their father) had molested Crissy. Betsy found the note, and their father later died by suicide too. No one ever talked about it, but now the silence is broken and the sisters are on the path to healing.
Also, Crissy ends up dating Nigel, her stage partner in the Diana show, and we assume they live happily ever after surrounded by sequins and trauma.
🧠 Final Thoughts: Wait… That’s It?
Here’s the thing: this book started out promising. The impersonator gig? Fun. The hacker teen? Cool. The crypto crime family? A bit done, but still entertaining. But by the second half, it felt like the pacing fell off a cliff—along with Yevgeny.
And the big question remains unanswered: Why would this mega-powerful crypto empire risk everything over a struggling off-strip casino? They could have bought an entire island or started a streaming platform. But nope, they went full mob-movie over Buckingham Palace Casino, which feels like the fictional version of a 2-star Yelp review.
🛍 Buy the Book (If You Still Want To)
🎰 Amazon
📚 If You Liked This Book, Maybe Try:
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The Last Flight by Julie Clark – for a smarter thriller with high stakes and identity switching that actually lands.
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Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano – if you want hitmen, humor, and women who get in way over their heads, but in a fun way.
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Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney – for an eerie thriller with better twists and a more satisfying ending.
Have you read The Princess of Las Vegas? Did the ending make more sense to you than it did to me? Or were you also wondering why they didn’t just buy a different casino and call it a day?
Let me know your thoughts below—bonus points if you’ve ever been to a Diana impersonator show. 👑🎲💥
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