The Street

A razor-sharp, blisteringly on-target thriller set in the world of dot-com start-up madness — a deft and entertaining mix of the confidence-game masterworks of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiassen, and Donald Westlake, as well as classic tell-all business narratives such as Liar's Poker and Barbarians at the Gates.

James Vincent Hanley, a Wall Street stockbroker specializing in Internet start-ups and unhappily slaving away for a subsistence wage of only $300,000, makes the jump to the other side of the Street and into the biggest game in history. He’s done his dot-com homework and launches his own start-up, Artemis-5.com, with the key ingredients for success–technology so cutting-edge it’s barely decipherable, a world-class board of directors whose credentials command a lemming-like public following, and carefully orchestrated Street buzz of epic proportions.

Jubal Thurgren, assistant director of enforcement for the Security and Exchange Commission and a man of Columbo-like intelligence and personality, smells a rat. Even as the buzz increases, Thurgren’s instincts tell him that Artemis-5, which has yet to reveal any substantive products or services, may not be quite what Hanley has cracked it up to be. As public delirium over Artemis-5’s impending stock offering escalates, Hanley and Thurgren, each with a spy in the other’s camp, launch elaborate and progressively more dangerous cat-and-mouse games. Each of them is deeply committed to his own cause: Thurgren can’t let Hanley continue unchallenged, and Hanley can’t let Thurgren get in the way of his plans. The two of them spiral inexorably toward a final confrontation, a complex and explosive sting where deceit and betrayal do suspenseful battle with old-fashioned idealism and the search for truth.

Featuring the most likable and insidious cast of characters since The Sting, The Street is sure to satisfy thriller lovers, business-story aficionados, and all of us who are hopelessly confused by a new, Net-crazed economy that threatens to overwhelm not only our culture but also our common sense.