Dead Winners By Dave McDonald Review and Guest Post

Powerball winners are dying and their winnings are missing.

A decorated former Marine officer is tired and broken until given another shot at life: a loving girlfriend, a lottery commissioner’s job, and a seductive female governor as his new boss. Within his first week as a commissioner, Brent Layne discovers he’s trapped in a corruption pit with everyone around him either lying or dying.

"Dead Winners” and the Powerball Lottery Guest Post

By Dave McDonald

     My tenth suspense novel, “Dead Winners” will be released on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as an ebook, plus as an Amazon paperback, in early March, 2014.  The book is a character-driven story about an ex-Marine Afghan veteran caught up in a Powerball lottery fraud.  If you like suspense, and sleep-robbing action with more twists than a bag of pretzels, you must try it.

     Since I did research on the Powerball Lottery for “Dead Winners”, I thought it might be interesting to share some of it.

     The Powerball is currently played across forty-three States, or offered to close to three hundred million people.

     The drawings are twice weekly, every Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m.

     The Powerball drawing is composed of fifty-nine sequentially numbered white balls and thirty-five sequentially numbered Powerballs.  To win, you must guess the five randomly selected white numbers and the one Powerball number selected.  Just six numbers, how easy is that?  Go write down your girlfriend’s birthday(don’t tell your wife)and your favorite number, and voila, maybe you’ll win.

     The chances of winning the Powerball are 1 in 175,223,510.  That sounds like impossible odds, but if you don’t play you can’t win, and people do win and win BIG.

     From 2003 through 2013, there have been one-hundred-fifty-five Powerball jackpot winners, with twenty of them winning over three-hundred million dollars each. Can you imagine winning that much money?  That’s a whole bunch of dream material.

     That’s an average of 14.1 Powerball jackpot winners per year.  WOW!  Where can I buy a ticket?  

     Now since “Dead Winners” takes place in South Carolina, I checked out their Powerball Jackpot history.  There have only been six SC winners since 2003, an average of 0.545 per year.  So you can understand why the SC Governor in “Dead Winners” gets suspicious when four South Carolina people win in the first six months after South Carolina takes over the administration of the drawing.  She becomes even more concerned when the SC winners are murdered and their winnings disappear.  Her position is threatened so she seeks help outside the bureaucracy.  Help from an ex-Marine officer, a man who has faced death and won, Brent Layne, a man hungry for work.

     What Brent finds out is the Powerball drawing process is tightly controlled with multiple changing witnesses of the drawing, testing for randomness, weighing the balls, x-rays, magnetic tests, the balls and equipment stored in a vault, and the building guarded around the clock, as it is in real life. 

     But in “Dead Winners” the system as it exists today has been breached, the drawing rigged.  To find out how, read “Dead Winners”.

     A little more trivia, the largest Powerball Jackpot won was six-hundred-fifty-six million dollars with four-hundred-seventy-four million dollars of the total being split by three winners. 

     Oh, in case you ever do win, the tickets do expire, ninety days to a year depending on the State.

     Good luck and I hope “Dead Winners” provides you some insight for your gambling.  Speaking of which, I’m offering a “Dead Winners” contest.  

    Dave McDonald, a romanticist at heart, writes suspense/thrillers.

http://www.amazon.com/David-McDonald/e/B009XGXN9W 

Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/RDaveMcDonald?f

Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/14387242

Twitter: AuthorDaveMcDon

Other published ebooks by Dave McDonald:

A Common Uprising

Sam’s Folly

Kugi’s Story

Death Insurance

Killing by Numbers

My Review:
I always wanted to win the lottery, now I am not so sure. Some people will do anything for money. Then there are people that will lie, cheat, steal, and kill for a lot of money. Once the bodies started piling up the web of lies got bigger and bigger. No one involved was safe, not even non-winners that were working on the case. The truth wants to stay hidden. I am giving this book a 5/5. I was given a copy to review, however all opinions are my own.