Balling the Jack

"Betting all you have cleans the system," says young Wall Street paralegal Tom Reasons as he hands over $400 of his weekly $447 paycheck to his bookie, Toadie, in bets on baseball games. But it's the low-profile sport of darts that gets Tom into real trouble, in this raucous, raunchy thriller. When he loses $40,000 on the toss of a feathered sliver of steel, Tom has to outsmart Mafia loan sharks to stay in one piece. Along the way, Frank Baldwin manages to tap into the energy of ambitious, amoral, and frighteningly fascinating 20-somethings.