📚 The Bezzle (Cory Doctorow)

Money-laundering, cyber-knavery and shell-company chicanery: Marty Hench is an expert in them all. He’s Silicon Valley’s most accomplished forensic accountant and well versed in the devious ways of Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (and there’s more crossover than you might imagine).
Cory Doctorow’s hard-charging, read-in-one-sitting, techno take on the classic PI pulp novel.
**It’s 2006, and Marty Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between the people who want to hide money and the people who want to find it.
He spends his downtime holidaying on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost $25. (Wait, what?)
When, during one vacation, Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.
Because he’s made his most dangerous mistake yet. He’s trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and identified their latest target: California’s Department of Corrections, who manage the state’s prison system.
Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls to be identified, the tycoons have hundreds of thousands of prisoners at their mercy, and the potential of millions of pounds to make off them.
But now, Marty is about to ruin their fun…

Source: The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow has a way of holding up a mirror that helps make the world around feel that bit stranger, in a good way. The Martin Hench series explores the world through the eyes of forensic accountant. With The Bezzle, Doctorow dives into the world of the US prison system and the way that anyone can be held guilty of something. Marlene argues that the book is a ‘bezzle within a bezzle’:

The story in The Bezzle is a bezzle within a bezzle in a kind of möbius strip of bezzling that doesn’t so much end as shift into a state of mutually assured destruction. A state that Marty, fortunately for him, is finally able to observe from the outside looking in, instead of either from the inside of a jail cell looking out the way that his friend Scott ends up, or up from six feet under, as the villain of this story certainly intended.

Source: GRADE A #BOOKREVIEW: THE BEZZLE BY CORY DOCTOROW by Marlene Harris

However, I was left wondering if we are always-already interpellated within the bezzle and that we are never truly outside of this?

I enjoyed the book and as always was left thinking about everything from pyramid schemes, open access and privitisation. I liked Tavendale’s suggestion that it is part novel and part cautionary tale.

It reads partly as a novel and partly a cautionary tale on the excesses of the worlds of business and finance, and on the toothlessness of governmental oversight.

Source: Book Review: The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow by Tavendale

This is probably a good way of discussing most of Doctorow’s writing as he shines a light on certain elements of life around us to help us think differently.

My only frustration was with who is Martin Hench. Yes there were similarities with The Red Team Blues, but there were times it felt like a different characters. I kind of wondered if this was some sort of quantum fiction where the same character is able to live out different realities in different worlds that are both related and unrelated. For example, in Red Team Blues, Hench is in his late 60’s. However, in the ten years that this book spans, I am unsure how old Hench is or is meant to be. With all that aside, I felt it was a thought provoking read and enjoyed reading it.