Beth Raymer

A young woman trapped in a deeply dysfunctional family in the seedy wilds of 1990s South Florida has to make a choice—save her family, or save herself—in this larger-than-life debut novel from the acclaimed author of Lay the Favorite. “With raw humor and even more raw pain, Beth Raymer’s Fireworks Every Night alchemizes the ubiquitous Florida Man headlines into a powerful, humane family portrait.”—Xhenet Aliu, author of Brass “Florida, we got it all. Motor sports, ribs, beer. You can drive on the sand right on up to the ocean. Fireworks every night.” That's how twelve-year-old C.C.’s father, who named her after his beloved Canadian Club whiskey, describes the appeal of their new home. The man is a born grifter, a used-car salesman who burned down his dealership in southern Ohio for enough insurance money to set up a life for himself, his wife, and his two young daughters in a place he picked largely at random, because the living seemed easy. C.C.’s mother is thirty-five going on seventeen, a housewife who just wants to drive a Mustang and hang out at the mall. C.C.’s sister goes from being a sweet, cheerful pre-teen to having a full-on drug addiction and listening only to heavy metal, after enduring forms of abuse within her family. In the midst of this chaos, C.C. is trying to stay afloat and make it out—to achieve some semblance of a stable life in America while coming up against the structural and cultural challenges of growing up in poverty. This tumultuous coming-of-age novel features an unforgettable protagonist, a character who narrates her life story with dark comedy and compassion for her family, even as she is failed by them. Those failures—and her self-taught methods for succeeding anyway—are the backbone of this deeply funny and surprisingly poignant story about hard bargains, family loyalties, and the grit of a woman determined to create a better life for herself than the one she was born into.

A Novel

Fireworks Every Night

a memoir of gambling

Lay the favorite

“Beth Raymer’s crackling, hilarious memoir ricochets through the gambling underworld in Las Vegas, and is peopled with all manner of lovable wack-jobs, none of whom is quite as wacky—or lovable—as Raymer herself.”—Marie Claire Beth Raymer waited tables at a dive in Las Vegas until a customer sent her to see Dink, of Dink Inc., one of the town’s biggest professional sports gamblers. Dink needed a right-hand man—someone who would show up on time, who had a head for numbers, and who didn’t steal. Beth got the job. Lay the Favorite is the story of Beth’s years in the high-stakes, high-anxiety world of sports betting—a period that saw the fall of the local bookie and the birth of the freewheeling, unregulated offshore sports book, and with it the elevation of sports betting in popular culture. As the business explodes, Beth rises from assistant to expert, running an offshore booking office in the Caribbean. As the men around her succumb to their vices—money, sex, drugs, gambling—Beth improbably emerges with her integrity intact, wiser, sharper, nobody’s fool. A keen and compassionate observer of the adrenaline-addicted roguish types who become her mentors, her enemies, her family, Beth Raymer depicts an insanely colorful world teeming with pathos and ecstasy. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE “Candid, smart, funny, wild and crazy.”—Elle “Raymer gleefully shatters the myth of the modern gambler. . . . Seduced by her stories, we long for this strange, sleazy and alluring landscape.”—Los Angeles Times “[Raymer depicts] a sordid, florid microworld lurching along the edge of society, not to mention legality. . . . She never condescends or indulges in reality-show caricature; she finds charm in the charmless, a point of light in the most lost of souls.”—The New York Times Book Review “Lay the Favorite reads more like a novel than a memoir. The rich characters are drawn in depth, yet simply and honestly.”—The Wall Street Journal “Entertaining (and often quite funny) . . . a delight to read.”—The New Yorker

A Memoir of Gambling

Lay the Favorite

This title gives a gripping glimpse into a high stakes underworld where the difference between winning big and losing everything you have comes down to how smart you play. It tells the story of Beth Raymer.

A True Story about Playing to Win in the Gambling Underworld

Lay the Favourite

Documents the author's adventures in the world of sports betting, tracing how she arrived in Vegas hoping to become a cocktail waitress only to be seduced by the gambler's lifestyle and its surfeit of illusory glamour and nefarious characters.

Beth Raymer

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