ARC Review: Martin Hench #2

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

Publication Date: February 20, 2024

Summary from NetGalley:

The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.

Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.

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 sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.

ARC provided by Tor Publishing via NetGalley for an honest review.

Confession:

This was not the exciting adventure that the first Marty Hench book was, but it was totally fascinating. This is quite the explanation of the financial demise in the early 2000’s wrapped up in the exploits of fictional characters. It also a social commentary on California politics, policing, and the prison system. You also learn quite a bit about pyramid schemes, real estate schemes and a whole lot of other financial stuff that allows the rich to just get richer. This is a book that should make you just as mad as the main character.

This is a younger version of Marty Hench than the first book. But he is just as passionate about his work and life as the older version. In this book he finds himself caught up in the lifestyle of the rich and famous on California’s Catalina Island. I loved the chapters about the island life, and all of the quirks of that community. It is there that we first meet Scott Warms, a tech friend of Marty’s that sold his startup company to Google. I liked Scott, he was a fun guy, who seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, and also seemed a bit out of step with the rich socialites he knew. Scott’s story is quite sad though as it progresses through the book, and it really struck home how bad our judicial system as become in this country.

The story progresses through Marty helping the residents of Catalina out of a pyramid scheme, involving fast food burgers, to a vendetta against the man who sends Scott to jail. Lionel Coleman Jr. was the perfect villain for this tale. Even though he has very little page time, you come to loathe him as a person as you learn about how he does business through Marty’s financial forensics. There is a lot of drugs, alcohol, lawyers (good and bad), bad cops and some violence sprinkled throughout to make things a bit more exciting between all of the financial and tech stuff. The pacing is a bit slow, but the material is so fascinating that you don’t really notice that.

This could definitely be read as a standalone, but if you really want to know and understand Marty, than I highly recommend that you read the first book. This was an interesting indictment of California’s policies and politics that will make you mad, but glad to know that there are, hopefully, people out there like Marty fighting the good fight.