Overview
James Vincent Hanley, a Wall Street stockbroker specializing in Internet start-ups and unhappily slaving away for a subsistence wage of only three hundred thousand dollars, finally decides to jump to the other side of the Street and into the biggest game in history. He's learned the dot-com lesson well and launches his own start-up, Artemis-5.com, with ingredients that are pure dynamite—technology so cutting-edge it's barely decipherable, a world-class board of directors whose credentials command a lemminglike public following, and carefully orchestrated Street buzz of epic proportions.
Jubal Thurgren, assistant director of enforcement for the Securities 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.
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 our common sense.