GARBAGE TIME

Basketball runs on the number — points, minutes, the stat line that decides a career — and on the brutally brief window in which a body is worth anything at all. In these eleven stories, women at the margins of the game — a stats keeper, a team physio, a player-development coordinator, a compliance officer — see the one figure that doesn't belong: the box score quietly massaged, the young body spent too fast, the deal that values a player only while the number holds.

They fight with rigor and conscience, never violence, insisting the code mean what it says. Suspense in the Sidney Sheldon tradition, where the game of numbers hides its wrongs inside the very stats everyone trusts.