Thoroughly entertaining, whether read as straightforward account of the disintegration of a life or as black comedy. It's to Keller's credit that a reader could take it for either.

Maggie accepts her friend Robin's invitation to accompany her on a holiday to a Caribbean island. Once there, Robin goes her own way and Maggie goes to hell in a handbasket. The tale is told in a 1st-person once-removed style inasmuch as the narration is 3rd-person but the reader sees things from Maggie's perspective only. This leads to some nice ambiguity: Robin might for example be in her self-centred way oblivious or downright nefarious or at bottom a protective friend.. And there are glimpses, like those offered by unreliable narrators, of the protagonist's being something other than she seems. A reader might think Maggie simply lost and pitiable but there are hints that she might instead be quite unpleasant--condescending, bitter, and clinging.

Keller is sometimes a bit heavy-handed, events occasionally seem contrived, and Maggie's decline is implausibly precipitous but the writing is smooth enough and even minor characters are more than figures painted on a backdrop. Jackpot is like a less one-dimensional version of, the likes of Jenn Ashworth's A Kind of Intimacy: a well-written, absorbing, undemanding story of a blinkered woman's unravelling that whilst not a literary work is too intelligent and too striking to be a mere beach read.