Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy in exchange for honest feedback.

A fun read, as always. It starts pretty lightly: forensic accountant Martin Hench joined his friend Scott for weekend getaways on Catalina Island. They befriended a local driver, and Martin quickly realized that the driver (and lots of his friends and neighbors) had become embroiled in a pyramid scheme–involving black market fast food, of all things (fast food joints are not allowed on the island). Exposing the scheme made an enemy of the powerful man (popularly known as Junior) who founded it, and the rest of the novel grew from this seemingly small seed. Hench explains what a bezzle is: the amount of time that passes between the commission of an embezzlement and its discovery. When Scott next returned to the island, he found himself under arrest and pled guilty to two felonies. "There's No Crime in Avalon" concludes with him heading up North to the redwoods to lie low.

"Three Strikes" finds Scott in a penitentiary, serving 25 years to life after being found with enough cocaine to earn a felony charge: the third strike of the title after the previous two felonies he pled to. After a rough start, he began to thrive in prison, courtesy of an active Dungeons & Dragons group and blotter acid smuggled in by the Dungeon Master. But the DM was released, and after some trepidation Martin took over, smuggling blotter acid in books he sent to Scott. Then, the California prison system was privatized, which quickly became a nightmare for the prisoners and their friends and family outside. All in-person visits were prohibited, and the system charged high prices for everything the inmates did on their tablets: video calls, eBooks and other media. Marty begins to unravel the corporate records, finding their old friend Junior. Then Scott suffered a brutal beating, and Junior met with Marty to warn him off.

"Ex Libris" was a rollercoaster ride. Marty found a way to help Scott, but it let Junior off the hook. Scott was furious–the point was to get Junior, saving his fellow inmates in the process. So, he found a way to implicate Junior in illegal activity, bringing down the entire scam. He earned an additional ten years of prison sentence, but he considered it a victory. The final notes cast doubt on the finality of that victory, but that is in line with the moral of the whole story. It is as much about the financial manipulations that caused the 2008 economic crash and a savage rebuke of privatized prison systems as it is about the characters. This is both a strength and a weakness. Doctorow always finds a way to weave social, economic, and political commentary into his fiction. Here it sometimes threatens to overpower an otherwise compelling narrative.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advanced Readers Copy.

The Bezzle was a really interesting took at the corruption of the prison system and felt like a thriller. I liked the writing and it kept me engaged.

Published by Tor Books on February 20, 2024

I loved this book. I recognize that I loved it because it pushed my buttons. Readers who do not share those buttons might not like it as much as I did, although it is a well told story that most fans of crime novels should appreciate. While stories about violence dominate crime fiction, I was pleased to read a book that focused both on financial crime and, even better, the dismal intersection of corporate greed and America’s prison industry.

Martin Hench is a forensic accountant. He recovers misappropriated money in exchange for 25% of the recovery. Hench first appeared in Red Team Blues. The Bezzle takes place a few years earlier. Hench is comfortable but not yet wealthy. He still needs to work from time to time to replenish his funds.

Hench hasn’t seen his friend Scott Warms in some time, so he is happy to receive Harms’ invitation to spend a long weekend on Catalina Island. Warms made a bundle of money by selling a startup to Yahoo. He knows many other wealthy people in the tech industry, some of whom vacation on Catalina. Warms and Hench plan to spend the weekend attending parties, drinking high-end alcohol, and doing drugs. Cocaine and weed, of course, but they also enjoy hallucinogens.

One of the parties is thrown by Lionel Coleman Jr. Hench learns from a driver that Coleman is importing fast food meals from the mainland, freezing them, and selling them to islanders who crave fast food because the franchises aren’t allowed to operate on Catalina. The labor is performed by people who have been recruited into a Ponzi scheme that Coleman has orchestrated. Hench convinces the driver that he will eventually lose everything he owns, as will his friends, family members, and most of the working-class island residents before Coleman disappears to the mainland with their cash.

Coleman doesn’t need the money he steals from the islanders; it’s small change to him. He steals it because he can. The novel suggests that he is representative of greedy, wealthy people around the world, people who operate fraudulent schemes of one sort or another, who dupe investors and consumers but rarely pay a price for their shameful behavior. They use campaign contributions and lobbyists to carve out loopholes in legislation that let them get away with fraud. Voters who are distracted by right wing screeds about crime and border invasions pay scant attention to the crime that actually affects them because those criminals are branded as entrepreneurs.

Hench causes Coleman’s scheme to crash before he can maximize his gains, forcing him to run back to the mainland before he is tarred and feathered. Coleman desires vengeance, a desire he satisfies when Warms is arrested for cocaine possession. The cocaine isn’t his, but Warms is a standup guy and won’t give up the person who left it in his car. He accordingly gets a monster three-strike sentence (the first two strikes being relatively inconsequential felony convictions for assault on an officer and drug possession during Warms’ youthful years).

Coleman has put together a bunch of businesses in the private prison industry that scam state government and prisoners alike. The prisons make money by cutting staff, which means cutting visitors, libraries, and efforts at rehabilitation. The evils that Doctorow writes about, including ridiculously expensive tolls that families must pay to speak to prisoners, are shockingly real, but they are a scam that most Americans don’t care about because prisoners don’t have lobbyists.

Coleman uses his leverage with the private prison system to make Warms’ life hell. When Hench starts looking into the ways that Coleman’s businesses are defrauding the government, Coleman threatens to have Warms killed if Hench doesn’t back off.

Cory Doctorow makes the point that successful businessmen confuse greed with intelligence. Hench is smarter than Coleman, leading to a relatively happy ending, assuming that anything about an unjust three-strikes imprisonment can be regarded as happy. But Warms is a likeable character who is upset when Hench seems willing to back away from Coleman just to save Warms’ skin. I always admire characters who are willing to sacrifice for the good of others.

And I admire Doctorow for telling an engaging story that spotlights the evil of private prisons. The issue doesn’t interest most people because, as Doctorow writes, “America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It’s not in our character.” Some sickness in the American soul causes people to believe that prisoners deserve to suffer. Americans like to feel superior to all the people we place behind bars until our children or friends join their ranks. Yet the people who really need to be in prison, the corporate fraudsters who have done much more damage than a typical three-strikes felon, never pay a price for their antisocial behavior.

Doctorow touches on other financial issues, including real estate investment schemes that profit by taking homes from underwater homeowners and the refusal of financial regulators to do their jobs because “regulation” is a dirty word to politicians who accept campaign contributions from regulated businesses. He writes about corrupt cops and a broken political system. And again touching on a neglected issue that is dear to me, he writes about the enormous profits the federal court system makes by charging the public to access supposedly “public” records — records that everyone should be able to see for free, rather than paying for the privilege of monitoring the actions of judges and lawyers in a judicial process that pretends to be open to the public.

Doctorow takes on all these issues without losing sight of the novelist’s primary goal: to tell an entertaining story. In part because the story is based on important issues that are usually ignored, in part because Doctorow’s central characters live their beliefs — beliefs that are founded in altruism rather than greed — and in part because the story is appealing, The Bezzle is a joy to read.

RECOMMENDED

I think I expected something more speculative, since this is from Doctorow, whose work I know from such books as _Little Brother_. Regardless, I enjoyed this tightly-plotted book where the enemy seems to be late stage capitalism with various names and faces. The protagonist is likable and compelling, and the story moves briskiy. I enjoyed the book.

The Bezzle is the second book in the Martin Hench series. Hench is a forensic accountant, helping companies find missing money. He makes enough money to live comfortably on, and is able to do his own side work. After he upsets some of the ultra-wealthy, he becomes involves a decade long endeavour to help a friend, and take down the wealthy who are using the privatized prison system as a personal playground and mark.

I always go in to a Doctorow book expecting to learn something. I’m not American, so this time around I learned all about privatized prison systems in American and how they’re really just a big ol’ money making machine. I actually had to go and research a lot of the things that were mentioned in the book because I kept thinking, “No, no. This is made up to make the book more interesting. To make the villains seem worse. That can’t actually be true.” And every damn time, it was true. It was upsetting. And I think that’s what made me love this book so much more. Somehow Doctorow made an exciting, interesting, and funny book, all while showcasing private prisons and the problems they have.

There’s something about the way Doctorow writes as well. Some of it feels like it should be info dumps, there’s long sections explaining different systems, or cryptocurrency, or whatever, and it shouldn’t feel as interesting as it is. He makes what could be dry info dumps interesting. Maybe it’s the character of Hench, there’s the perfect amount of sass in this character while talking about it all, or maybe it’s just how accessible all the writing is, but it keeps me engaged even when it’s not something I might be interested in learning or understanding.

I mentioned that it was a funny book. The friendships that Hench has, the shenanigans at the start of the book, it was hilarious. The Bezzle manages to take some really unsettling topics about prisons, and add in just the right amount of humour to balance it all out. It doesn’t make light of what’s going on in the story, or take away from the real-life situations it references, but it uses that kind of black humour that works to push through. I know that kind of humour doesn’t work for everyone, but I found it so well done in The Bezzle.

All in all, I can’t recommend this book enough. I can’t recommend Cory Doctorow enough. And as much as I enjoyed Red Team Blues, you don’t need to read it before The Bezzle if you click more with the synopsis of this one. They use the same character, but they do work as standalone books. You should read both, but if you want to start with The Bezzle, it won’t hurt your reading experience.

My thanks to NetGalley for making an eARC of this book available to me.

Pretty darned good. Quite the takedown of California's criminal reform and prison privatization, particularly looking at the economic aspects that drove it all. Like the first book about this character, this one gives a fascinating (and dismaying) look into financial crimes and the lack of morals in those behind the financial networks.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel that read a little like narrative nonfiction, but it was weirdly entertaining! I felt as though main character Martin was lying around with me, telling me of his adventures while we both slipped off into old age and ayahuasca. It was also a bit like reading an old school Tom Clancy thriller about forensic accounting. I could hear the pounding piano in the background at times. The humanity of the characters shone through the technical backdrop of financial machination, and I even cheered a bit at the end.

Thank you to Tor and NetGalley for my copy. These opinions are my own.

Thank you so much to Netgalley & the publisher for this review copy! I am so looking forward to this and to writing a full review on my social media when I am able! Thanks again!

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow is a financial thriller that offers a glimpse along with real insight into financial shenanigans. It is very highly recommended.

In 2006 Martin Hench, a self-employed forensic accountant, is vacationing with his friend Scott Warms on Catalina Island, where there is no crime. Martin uncovers a black market financial pyramid scheme that is based on the resale of fast food on the island where fast food chains are banned. He knows that the man running the scheme, Lionel Coleman Jr., is going to take all the money the islanders have invested so he helps them bring the scheme down. Lionel finds out Martin and Scott were involved in ending the fast food scam, so he gets revenge on Scott, who ends up sent to prison. But this is just the beginning of the scams Martin uncovers that are being perpetrated by the ultra-wealthy, including California’s Department of Corrections.

The fascinating narrative is via Martin telling someone the story about his experiences in 2006 leading up to the 2008 financial crash. Doctorow does an excellent job writing about what could be considered boring financial details that a forensic accountant uncovers and makes the examination interesting. He knows about tech-sector monopolies, copyright laws, and internet ethics. He also understands that some of these wealthy people wield real power behind the scenes.

Most of the novel is akin to a procedural and provides details into the financial aspects of cases leading ultimately up to a final major encounter/case. The writing is clear, clever, and concise. This can work as a stand-alone novel. 4.5 rounded up. Thanks to Tor for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Edelweiss, X, and Amazon.

Cory Doctorow and his twisty, brilliant mind crafted a fascinating novel of corruption. Doctorow’s worldview once again seems to convey a “We’re doomed” message- but don’t worry, it is written in an entertaining way. I cheered for an LSD-dropping prisoner sentenced to twenty-five to life and found forensic accounting interesting (but only in this book). Doctorow made me want to read about California prisons and crooked cops, and I didn’t get bored. Unique characters and quotable lines make this even more enjoyable. I loved it! Five stars.

Cory Doctorow's latest novel, THE BEZZLE, is a sequel/prequel to his previous book RED TEAM BLUES. Like that earlier book, this new one features the narrator/protagonist Martin Hench, a "forensic accountant" in California. But this book takes place in the years 2006-2016, a bit before the present or near-future timeline of RED TEAM BLUES. The word "bezzle" comes from "embezzle"; it designates "the weeks, months, or years that elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery."

Somebody has embezzled a lot of money, but the victim is not yet aware of having lost the money. Like the earlier (but later-set) novel, THE BEZZLE is about complicated financial scams, of the sort that is made much easier than it might have been in the past, thanks to internet technology. As a forensic accountant, Martin Hench's job is to unravel such scams, which involves working through an immense volume of legal and financial documents within which the crime has been hidden through obfuscatory rhetoric together with obfuscatory financial dealings and obfuscatory legal moves.

Scams such as the ones that happen in the course of the novel are probably quite prevalent in contemporary capitalist society; but they are very hard to find out about. Martin Hench spends a lot of time researching obscure documents and collating scattered facts. The scams constitute an enormous transfer of wealth from ordinary people to the already extremely rich; but they are much more difficult to discern than, say, wage theft (or even ordinary wages, which never compensate people for the whole amount of wealth that their labor has produced). Money gets skimmed off the top of multiple transactions, and transferred from one account to another to yet another, in ways that allow the owners to not only accumulate large quantities of money, but also to escape having to pay taxes on it.

The novel gets down to the nitty-gritty about such crooked transactions. It shows us, not only how these scams are run, but also why it is so hard to find out about them -- and even how laws are often changed to make what the perpetrators are doing legal. One famous real-life example, mentioned in passing in the course of the book is Amway, which is essentially a pyramid scheme with the company owners piling up the cash, and exploiting the people working for the company as contractors, so that the latter can only make money from it by finding other sub-contractors, and so on down the line. The novel mentions that when Gerald Ford became President, he got Congress to change the laws in specific ways that would shield Amway from prosecution (Ford, like the families who run Amway came from Grand Rapids, Michigan; one of the Amway people, Betsy DeVos, later became Trump's Secretary of Education).

So the didactic point that Doctorow makes is that these sorts of financial scams skirt the edges of legality; the scams are protected from discovery both because of all the misdirections into the ways they are set up, and because the owners, being already wealthy, usually have good political connections.

All this may sound extremely dry and technical. But the novel is quite engaging. It has the structure of a thriller. The more that Martin Hench discovers, the more he realizes that what he knows so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Mostly, the novel is driven by Martin's attempts to help his friend Scott, one of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but more decent than most. Scott gets in massive trouble when he irks a rich person who is much more powerful than he is; and yet more trouble when he is arrested because the police find cocaine in his car, and he refuses to tell them who the cocaine belonged to. Scott is in prison for most of the novel, better off than many prisoners because he still has millions of dollars in the bank. But the privatization of prisons -- which actually happened in the United States during the years covered by the novel -- leads to money saving schemes and outright scams by the financial companies that ultimately control the privatized prison management. Taking government money for prison management, skimming off as much of this money as possible, and laundering it through the Bahamas, is an incredibly profitable enterprise, because most voters hate prisoners anyway, and don't care if they are being massively mistreated. There are also the thugs, both inside and outside the prisons, and including corrupt cops, who can be relied on to beat up and otherwise intimidate anyone who comes close to finding out about the scams. In the course of the novel -- this is only a minor spoiler -- Scott in prison and Martin on the outside both get beaten up because they are trying to figure out what is really going on.

THE BEZZLE works as well as it does because its didactic message, which is delivered with a large degree of justified rage, is woven into a thriller that has exciting twists and turns, and gets us involved in the story entirely on its own terms. (There are also lots of interesting nuggets along the way; besides the actually true Amway story, we also get, for instance, just in a page or two, the story of a musician who is ripped off by his former agent who steals his sampling royalties, only for us to find out that the record company was actually ripping off the scumbag agent as well as the impoverished actual musical creator).

In sum, Cory Doctorow once again proves that he is a vital novelist for our Internet-drenched times. He writes an exciting book that also reveals important truths about our plutocratic society.

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.

This was my first ever Cory Doctorow novel, which I am now mad at myself for getting into so late. It was fascinating, and I'm glad that it was more like a prequel so I didn't feel like I was missing out with not having read the first in this series. Who knew forensic accounting was the most exciting field??

I got an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley.com in return for offering an honest review. This book is the sequel to the author's previous novel Red Team Blues. Like in that book, forensic accountant Marty Hench is the protagonist. And despite the seeming dullness of his career, this book is a thriller that had me from the start.

The plot takes place in the past of the first novel. In other words, this is technically a prequel. He is telling someone about how he came to learn so much about prisons while never having served time in one. The story opens on Catalina Island with Marty repeatedly joining a friend named Scott there for vacations. They come across something odd going on there that propels the plot forward. A driving aspect of the plot is the friendship between Marty and Scott. The relationship is deep and affectionate and one I've rarely seen in modern novels—deep male friendship.

The story is even better than in the first book. There was a lag in that one. This book is maybe a little slow to start, but once the initiating action takes place, it takes off. The story does come around to a selfless sacrifice that may be surprising but is completely relatable and realistic. If you enjoyed the first of this series, you owe it to yourself to pick up this one soon.

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Honestly, if this sparks a whole future explosion of a genre of FORENSIC ACCOUNTANTS, then I could not be happier.

I see this kind of thing much too rarely. It’s usually very niche and hardly ever in the realm of FICTION, but tracking down a good DD is especially delicious, especially when it touches to righteously on the very real graft, cons, and purely evil-spirited world of our own nasty high finance.

This is a case of reality — as explained through fiction — and done so well, so deftly, so smartly, that it should be required reading for ANYONE interested in the world of big money cons.


Cory Doctorow is spitting some awesome words here. This isn’t the first novel I’ve read that follows Martin Hench, forensic accountant, but it is the earliest one in the narrative timeline.

Let’s just put it this way: I am FASCINATED. Endlessly so. I could read this forever. Please, please, let me have more!

Thanks to Net Galley for the preview. As always Doctorow is very readable and I learn about some sector of society with which I have no exposure.
This time around, the privatisation of prisons is the issue du jour. Per usual, the foils in the narrative are fueled by greed and power, and their cruelty knows no bounds.
I enjoy Martin Hench a great deal, as well as his nomadic compadres. Otherwise, the ensemble of rich technocrats get a bit tiresome.
Back to the prison issue- private companies have no business running prisons. Like for profit charter schools and universities, looking out for the best interests of investors as well as the residents is impossible. The investors win.

Sex, drugs & alcohol, violence, lawyers, bad cops, simple and elaborate financial scams, lives of the super rich, and lots of fun cyber tech means that Cory Doctorow has done it again. He wrote “The Bezzle”, the second book in the Martin Hench, Forensic Accountant series.

Although “The Bezzle” can stand by itself, I would gently suggest first reading the initial book in the series, “Red Team Blues” for two reasons. First, I think the first book does a better job of introducing the surprisingly cool world of Forensic Accounting, and second, although “The Bezzle” is a great book, I found “Red Team Blues” totally awesome. But after you’ve read it, definitely continue to enjoy “The Bezzle” for the sex and drugs and the illegal multilevel marketing scam to sell smuggled hamburgers on Catalina Island, as well as the plot to…. WAIT! I think I’ve said too much. Just start reading! These are awesome books!

I thank Cory Doctorow and Tor Books for kindly providing a temporary electronic review copy of this excellent book.

This is not an exciting book.

It *is* an utterly fascinating book.

As an L.A. native, I simply loved the history here of everything from L.A. to Catalina. I loved the fact that I knew every intersection mentioned in the book.

But it definitely wasn’t exciting. It’s a methodical study of California – race, politics, the prison system, and finance. And it’s horrifying and eye-opening. I did enjoy Hench and his friend, but saw them as more of a vehicle for a blistering expose of a for-profit prison system and the people who benefited from it.

A good book, but definitely more about message than story.

• ARC via Publisher

This is the second novel in the Martin Hench series about a freelance forensic accountant/security consultant. When we meet Martin in Red Team Blues he is 67 and living in a pimped out bus/RV. This book is a prequel and we meet a much younger Martin as he inexplicitly finds himself fighting against the excesses of a group of 1 percenters. He uses his skills to uncover layer after layer of shell companies and expose some of the excesses of the private prison industry. You may have never thought you should read a series of novels about a forensic accountant - but you should.