The Bezzle

LoveReading Says

The Bezzle, the second book in Cory Doctorow’s Martin Hench series, sees Hench in Avalon, “a chocolate-box town on an enchanted island, twenty-two miles from the Port of Los Angeles”.

A freelance forensic accountant who was there when Silicon Valley started up, Martin bags himself 25% of percent of whatever wrong-doings he uncovers, which means he gets to spend a lot of time between jobs on Catalina Island. It’s here that he and a mate embroil themselves in a scam around overpriced fast-food hamburgers. In turn, this sees him become entangled in the dirty, dangerous world of California’s corrupt private prisons.

Told in retrospect, with occasional interjections from Marty later in life, The Bezzle is an entertaining story that makes many pertinent critiques of capitalism along the way.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen’s lifelong love of reading and writing began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, and very much wished that witches (and Mrs Pepperpot) were real.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About The Bezzle

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... A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a red-hot follow up to Red Team Blues.

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