Life as a Sandwich — Eric Peterson

It's the verge of the millennium, and the California economy is booming. The backdrop for this dark-comic novel is the sprawling, colorful, bursting-at-the-seams megalopolis of San Diego—a picture-postcard setting with a seamy underside, where blind ambition and entrepreneurial zeal blur boundaries of law, common sense, and decency. Protagonist Wallace Noe and his wife, Hannah, are card-carrying members of the sandwich generation: squeezed between raising children and looking after an elderly parent, struggling to make ends meet—and to keep their marriage together.When a family tragedy forces Wallace to reevaluate his life, he stakes his future on a start-up company and the values and work ethics of his father's generation, never imagining the sequence of events that will shatter his comfortable world. With sharp humor and masterly insight, author Eric Peterson dishes up a rollicking account of California's modern-day gold-rush—the heady times of the high-tech boom, when stories of mind-boggling riches are commonplace and everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie.