The Bezzle

Let’s talk for a moment about Cory Doctorow. (And bear with me, I’m sick while writing this, so not quite as cogent as usual.) If you’re a science fiction fan who hasn’t read any of his work, you’re seriously missing out. He’s an author, journalist, and activist who’s written both fiction and non-fiction. He fights against DRM and believes technology companies shouldn’t be able to hold you, your information, or your purchased digital books hostage. And these themes are clear in his books. Little Brother, and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, are favorites and good entry points to his work.

Doctorow has started a new series about a retired forensic accountant named Marty Hench. Wait, this is a thriller?, you ask. The show more first one, Red Team Blues, is something I’d describe as a cryptocurrency thriller – Marty gets caught up in a situation with some cryptocriminals, money laundering, tax evasion, and has to fight to make it out alive.

I just finished the sequel, The Bezzle, and it’s a very different subject but still in the same vein. To quote from Goodreads, it’s “A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash…” This one is set a earlier in Marty’s career, and we don’t get the crypto, the hacking, the same sneaky subterfuge. This one is a lot heavier, as the criminals are uber wealthy men who’ve decided to use the California prison system to bilk the government and make money, at the expense of the prisoners and their loved ones.

I really enjoy these books, but they’re not your typical “thriller”. There’s violence but it’s never exceptionally gory, and a lot of the tension is a quieter type, particularly in the second book. I enjoyed Red Team Blues a little more since it was more tech thriller, and The Bezzle is more financial thriller.

Sometimes you want a fast, explosive thriller that you’ll race through, enjoy, and forget the next day. And sometimes you want one that will make you stop and take a look at the world around you and the systems underpinning it. This is definitely the second. show less

Although nominally fiction, the story is mostly a vehicle to deliver Doctorow's powerful condemnation of the American prison-industrial complex, and how prison privatization made it even worse and is inherently an irredeemably corrupt enterprise. The big twist is that instead of the stereotypical inner city black man who gets swept up in gang/drug activity and falls prey to systemic racism, the victim here is a white multimillionaire who runs afoul with forces so overwhelmingly powerful that not even his privilege or vast wealth can protect him. And if even someone like that can get chewed up by the system, what hope is there for the rest of us.

If you know Cory Doctorow as a science fiction writer (as I do) then you might be a little confused by this book and the previous one, Red Team Blues. It's set more or less in contemporary times and, as far as I was able to determine, there's little that is not based on actual occurrences. It's like when Margaret Atwood talks about The Handmaid's Tale, she says there is nothing in that book that hasn't taken place at some point somewhere in the world.

Martin (Marty) Hench is a forensic accountant and he specializes in uncovering fraud and scams. He's not wealthy but he usually has to only work a few months out of the year because when he recovers money he gets 25% of it as his fee. And, usually, the amounts he finds are substantial. So, show more when his friend Scott Warms invites him to go to Catalina Island with him, Martin is free to do so. Scott is a tech entrepreuner who sold his company to Yahoo! and is very rich. On Catalina Island he socializes with other ultra-rich people and so does Marty by extension. Scott likes to take fast-food hamburgers over to Catalina to give to the locals who live there because there are no fast-food joints on the island. On one visit their driver/guide introduces them to the new scheme that monopolizes all the fast food that comes onto the island by getting people with access to it to give it up in return for shares in the scheme. As the driver explains it Martin and Scott realizes this is just a Ponzi scheme and they know that no-one ever gets rich in them. They disclose this to their driver and get him to withdraw from the scheme and get all his friends to do so. This brings the scheme down and incurs the wrath of the head, Lionel Coleman Jr. Some years later when Scott racks up a third felony charge for possession of cocaine he is sent to prison for life. Marty tries to visit and help Scott but shortly after a private company is given the contract for running all the non-essential services at the prison. Things like meals, visits, commissarry, library, telephone calls. And guess who turns out to be head of the company that got this contract? Yes, their old friend Lionel Coleman Jr. He takes the opportunity to make things as hard as possible for Scott and Scott wants Marty to take the company down. When Marty starts investigating all the shell companies and off-shore accounts, Marty gets roughed up by some police officers who are investors in the company.

Although I've never longed to live in the US, this book made me wonder if I even want to visit there. Who knows what other segments of society are stacked against the ordinary person and when one might run afoul of the "rules". And, especially if a certain person wins the presidential election later this year. show less

As a Silicon Valley forensic accountant, Martin Hench usually works to untie the knots in startup spreadsheets. In Red Team Blues, he unraveled a scheme involving cryptocurrency. In The Bezzle, he tells a story about the first dotcom boom when he helped the victim of a Ponzi scheme on Catalina Island and a young man who ran afoul of corruption in California’s recently privatized prisons.
Hench can be your “avenging angel of the balance sheet.” But there are limits. He explains that once you have invested in a Ponzi scheme, the money is gone. The best you can do is cut your losses and get out. You may never get your money back, but some revenge may be possible if you can take advantage of the bezzle, the period when an embezzler show more has his swag, but his victim has yet to feel the loss.
The Bezzle is not the science fiction novel we usually get from Cory Doctorow, but it is one of his most character-driven stories. Hench is like the Ancient Mariner as he tells an unnamed listener his story of labyrinthian greed that fascinates and appalls. show less

Novel wrapped around an explainer of our descent into hell via unregulated financial markets and unmitigated greed. I did not understand everything—it was like trying to catch a bowling ball. The aside on Aaron Swartz broke my heart. Holy shit.

Marty Hench returns in a prequel (you don't need to read Red Team Blues to enjoy this book, but I think you should because I enjoyed it) about some of his earlier exploits as a forensic accountant. This book starts "small" by tackling MLMs and then moves on to the myriad problems of the American prison system.

This is one of those books that I really loved, and feel like I can't write about intelligently. So I'll just say, Doctorow gets very real with his criticisms on how our prisons are run and how the people within them are abused. I feel like he covers a lot for a novella, without it feeling too info-dumpy.

If you said the ending was idealist, I wouldn't argue, though it definitely wasn't a happy ending wrapped up in a neat little show more bow. I'll definitely be reading whatever Marty Hench book he writes next, and of course, remain a fan of Doctorow's work overall. show less

A while back, I saw a tweet from someone who said they only read non-fiction because fiction is lacking "information density." This is someone who obviously hasn't read a Cory Doctorow novel. Both The Bezzle and Red Team Blues, along with the forthcoming third Marty Hench novel, are so information rich and dense that you can't lot learn something. And oh how entertaining that learning is when you're in Cory's hands.