Chimney sweep Shane McCarthy has three great loves in life: a whip smart wife named Lou, pickup basketball, and his booming hometown, San Francisco. While Lou hunts easy millions at the height of the dot-com frenzy, Shane fills his extra hours searching for a troubled player from his weekly hoops game who has disappeared, leaving only a bulging duffle bag behind. Following a trail that winds through Pacific Heights parties and projects, Shane unravels a mystery that links his wife's new world to the missing man and his family. Evoking the glitter of The Great Gatsby and the pulsing streets of Clockers, Winners is both a chronicle of a surreal historic moment and a gripping portrait of a man caught between two worlds. A novel of startling scope and ambition, Winners reaches into the hearts and minds of would-be millionaires and ghetto touhgs, businesswomen and single moms, gym-rat moguls and pissed-off slackers, all grasping for the gold ring of something better.

"Shane McCarthy is a Berkeley-educated chimney sweep, plying his trade in the mercurial atmosphere of dot-com bubble San Francisco circa 1999. His wife, Lou, glides in and out, obsessed with making her own start-up fortune. Outside of home and work, Shane's life revolves around basketball games at the Firehouse, an asphalt refuge where he plays the game with other 30-somethings, reveling in the physicality of crashing bodies. When Sam, a 20-year-old who has penetrated this sanctum of men fighting early middle age, disappears from the weekly games, Shane decides to search for him. The hunt begins to fill the gaping void in Shane's daily existence; sandwiched between the encroaching nouveaux riches as they transform his beloved city into a luxurious playground and his ambitious, distant wife, he ventures into a gritty, other San Francisco. Here he meets Sam's mother, Debra, tough and tortured and lost in the vortex of violence that plagues her inner-city neighborhood. The two slowly feint and jab at one another, trying to gain trust and information. A puzzling interruption arrives in the person of an enigmatic venture capitalist acquaintance of Lou's who latches onto Shane and drags him out for a night of slumming, but fortunately his presence causes only minor confusion. Martin's novel is a well-crafted, unsentimental examination of loneliness and the lengths to which some people will go in order to connect with another human being. Agent, Jay Mandel at the William Morris Agency. (Feb. 14)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A novel of startling scope and ambition, "Winners" reaches into the hearts and minds of would-be millionaires and ghetto toughs, businesswomen and single moms, gym-rat moguls and slackers, all grasping for the gold ring of something better.