Belt Publishing
The Set Up
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By Jon Wynn
May 20, 2025
Ally, an aspiring actress, is about to give up on getting her big break. But then, after another disappointing audition, a charismatic scene partner says he has a fun gig for her. Soon, Ally is making easy money working for a guerrilla-marketing outfit called The Set Up. Now she's getting lots of practice pretending to be someone she's not-but each job seems more suspicious than the last.
Marshall is a washed-up journalist, teaching a summer class at the university and struggling to keep his students (and himself) focused on his planned lessons. Someone has been leaving copies of his old articles on his lectern every morning, forcing him to revisit the story of a decades-old tragedy and mistakes he's made … both personal and professional.
Web, a quirky loner, has always been ready to pick up and go at a moment's notice. In fact, he's very good at not being noticed, at least not unless he wants to be. That's been helpful in his years working for the Set Up, but the new hire's questions are starting to make Web feel less confident about his work as a con man.
What is the Set Up, and who's playing whom? The search for answers leads Ally, Web, and Marshall from the glitz of the Strip to the grit of Sin City's strip-mall suburbs, and from an abandoned Unification compound to a deadly bar mitzvah. As their paths converge, this unlikely trio uncover the shadowy power dynamics and shifting personalities that shape a city.
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Jon Wynn is a professor and the department chair of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has written The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York and Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport, and co-authored The City & The Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Underserved Communities. His work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Salon, the Washington Post, and other venues. The Set Up is his first novel.
Advance praise for The Set Up:
"An M-80 of Vegas noir through an intersectional lens, The Set Up delivers a roaring romp of deception, identity, desire, and double crosses. In a city built on spectacle, who's really pulling the strings? Wynn's fierce wit, consumptive characters, and keen sociological eye transform the glittering Strip into the ultimate trick mirror. A must-read, and one of the smartest and most fun thrillers I've read all year." —Margot Douaihy, bestselling author of Scorched Earth and Blessed Water
"Set in the dystopic present of surveillance capitalism, The Set Up moves between an ordinary college classroom and the underbelly of Las Vegas, gradually peeling back the layers of a world where no one is who they appear to be, and nothing happens by chance. Somehow both pulse-pounding and cerebral, this is a stunning debut novel—at once an addictive, slow burn thriller, a prism refracting its light on the everyday, and a master class in sociology." —Grace M. Cho, author of National Book Award Finalist, Tastes Like War
ISBN: 9781953368942 | Paperback | 256 pages | 6 x 8
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