Life as a Sandwich

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 elder...