This was very slow to get going and if I didn't already know Doctorow's work I might have given up. The first 20% reads like a travelogue for the ultra-rich as Marty accompanies his tech-founder friend on luxury trips to Catalina. Persevere, though, because it does seed vital elements of the story and serve as a contrast to what follows.

And what follows is a powerful indictment of corruption and the prison-industrial complex and a moving account of the strengths (and limits) of friendship. What Doctorow does so brilliantly is make complex financial crimes comprehensible while telling an intriguing and pacy story. He humanises injustice - those who suffer and those who exploit. The ending of this book in particular will stay with me.
*
Copy from NetGalley

En esta segunda entrega de la saga Martin Hench, Cory Doctorow se lanza totalmente al thriller financiero dejando de lado la escasa, casi inexistente ciencia ficción de la entrega anterior. Y creo que es algo que le sienta bien al libro, porque resulta todavía más aterrador el hecho de que los hechos ocurran en el pasado y que la pesadilla en la que se ven envueltos Martin y su amigo sea tan verosímil como aterradora.


La principal víctima del agudo bisturí de Doctorow en esta novela es el sistema penitenciario estadounidense, vendido al mejor postor para aliviar las arcas de los estados, cuando en realidad gracias a la ingeniería financiera y a una absoluta falta de escrúpulos, los presos sufren hasta desnutrición y los costes se disparan, convirtiendo su vida en un infierno en la tierra en el que les exprimen hasta el último centavo para poder ponerse en contacto con sus familias. Es un tema recurrente en la ciencia ficción especulativa de futuro cercano, como Past Crimes.

Lo que no me ha gustado tanto es la apología del uso recreativo de las drogas que también transpira todo el libro, con la cocaína gastándose más rápido que la leche de fórmula en una maternidad y el ácido como la única salida de escape para los presos.

Ahora bien, The Bezzle me parece una lectura IMPRESCINDIBLE para tener algo de cultura sobre los desvaríos financieros a los que nos vemos sometidos bien por las autoridades, bien por los poderes fácticos. Y resulta también aleccionador comprender que muchas de las víctimas de los timos internacionales incluso pueden saber que es un timo, pero se creen más inteligentes que el sistema y pretenden beneficiarse de él. Pero, como ya deberíamos saber, la banca siempre gana, sobre todo cuando las cartas están marcadas y las reglas pueden cambiar en cualquier momento.

Se trata de una lectura muy rápida, no llega a las 250 páginas, pero muy entretenida y sobre todo aleccionadora. Todos sabemos de qué pie cojea Cory Doctorow, pero eso no es óbice para que también sea un estupendo divulgador muy didáctico. Con cada libro suyo se acaban aprendiendo cosas.

In addition to being known as a sci-fi writer, Cory Doctorow is a journalist and campaigner against DRM (digital rights management). He has worked for the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). He left London for LA in disgust at the level of criminality in the financial services industry. All of this is worth bearing in mind when reading The Bezzle. 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.

Genre-wise, The Bezzle is a… what? Financial thriller? It’s not a genre I’ve ever really explored, but it’s one that I definitely enjoyed here. The main character is a forensic accountant which, to me, sounds incredibly dry. It works, though. Really, it does, and I had a blast exploring something that was really new to me.

The novel works well as a story and I ultimately enjoyed it a lot. At times I found the pacing a bit iffy, particularly early on. The novel opens on the island of Catalina. Before we get into the story, we learn quite a lot about the island, which led me down some entertaining rabbit holes on Wikipedia as particular aspects of the island’s history – most notably the island’s bizarre history with the Wrigley family – grabbed my interest. We then see the slow unfolding of a very local financial scam. I like a book that makes me think. I also like books that excel at world-building. This is a novel that is set in our world, in a time in which I was alive, but I’d still say it does a fantastic job, for me, at world-building. It describes things that I simply did not know about. The island of Catalina is fascinating and this book set that scene really well. The financial world in which so much of the story is rooted, is also largely a mystery to me. Oh, sure, we get a glimpse at it when a big story comes along like the Paradise Papers, but beyond that, what do most of us really know? That world is opened up to us, here. The horror of the American prison system is also laid bare, particularly regarding privately-run, for-profit prisons. It’s easy to look at how such things are described in this book and forget that they are not just plot devices in some piece of Orwellian fiction, but are actually Orwellian fact in a country that purports to be a developed nation.

The island of Catalina (and the town of Avalon thereupon), as a small, isolated community, acts as a microcosm of the bigger, national and international communities and markets in which bigger scams take place. These are explored later in the novel. At the time of reading, I felt that this introductory section perhaps went on a little long. I still feel that way, but there is a definite payoff in the last third of the book as characters, plot points, and themes that are introduced on Catalina do resolve themselves or become important. There’s also Katya. She’s there too, I suppose. The lower-stakes Catalina storyline also primes the reader to better understand the more complex financial gymnastics described later in the novel. I feel that the pacing is a lot better once we are off the island, with the third part of this three-part novel being truly excellent and hitting what feels like all of the right notes at just the right times.

I have not read Doctorow’s other Martin Hench book. Marty is the protagonist of this novel and whilst he is broadly likeable, I couldn’t really describe all that much of his personality. Yeah, he’s loyal. He has intelligence and compassion. He has an innate sense of justice. The more interesting characters are the secondary ones. Scott Warms, Marty’s tech millionaire buddy, feels more developed in the early sections of the book. We can understand why Marty would like Scott, but we also see his flaws. We get an insight into his professional life, both in terms of his successes and frustrations. We later get an insight into some of his romantic life. Scott is a fantastic character whom we care about. I suppose he needs to be, as most of the misfortune that is ladled out in this story falls upon him. Well, yes and no. Scott himself makes the point that much of the misfortune that he experiences is actually that which is heaped upon many Americans. The events that befall him befall many others who are in far worse situations without millions of dollars in the bank to cushion their fall. We need to like him so that he can better act as an avatar of misery. Scott’s situation throughout much of the book is bleak.

The villain of the story, in as much as one character is used as a stand-in for corporate greed, shady financial dealings, and unaccountability, is pretty well developed, too. We see multiple sides of him as the story goes on, and there’s a definite path that we’re taken down with him. He’s initially pretty laughable before we start to see some edge, then some menace, then full-on, almost-omnipresent villainy.

The ending is appropriate. Is it necessarily the ending that the reader, invested as we are in Marty’s investigations and the travails of Scott, wants? No. It’s not quite, but it’s realistic. This is a book not only set in our own world, but firmly anchored there. We don’t see a picture-perfect ending, but we do see a realistic one, and one that does come with some satisfaction. It makes sense both narratively and tonally.

This genre and author are both new to me and I had a great time with the novel. I really do recommend it, and if the worst criticism I can level is a slightly bland protagonist surrounded by interesting secondary characters and a bit of a slow opening section, then we’re in good shape. The story is thoroughly engaging. The author also brings a lot of really interesting observations of our own world to his writing. This is a novel that rewards the curious. Having finished The Bezzle, I definitely intend to go back and read Doctorow’s previous Martin Hench novel.

I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow and his books always made me think and keep reading. This is a very good one that talks about very complex things turning them into something simple to understand.
Well done and exciting.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has taken a stand against big corporations, in particular the use of Digital Media Rights to lock people into particular companies. So much so that the audio version of his new book, The Bezzel and the previous book in this series, are being offered through Kickstarter rather than through Audible (Amazon). This little bit of background might give prospective readers an idea of where Doctrow is coming from in this particular series in which his protagonist is a forensic accountant and his targets are dirty corporations.
Doctrow introduced forensic accountant Martin Hench in Red Team Blues. That book was a day after tomorrow thriller about crypto-currency. No knowledge of that book is required to enjoy The Bezzle which is a flashback novel, set in 2006 and charts Hench’s involvement in bringing down a local Ponzi scheme and then becoming an expert on the privatised Californian prison system. Doctrow is using Hench to explore various periods in US corporate history. A third Hench book Picks and Shovels, due next year will take Hench back to his early days in the 1980s and the rise of the tech giants
The Bezzle starts in the town of Avalon on Catalina Island, a playground for the wealthy off the coast of California. Hench is taken there by his friend Scott Warms, who has made his own money by selling out to Yahoo!. They soon find that the population of the island have become the financial playthings of a super-rich investor. It is in this section of the book that readers who don’t already know learn the meaning of the title: ‘The Bezzle’ is a term coined in the 1930s to describe the time between when a con starts and when it is revealed where everyone is happy as they believe they are making money even though in reality there is not enough money to go round. The rest of the book involves Hench’s investigation into the California prison system which was privatised and sold off to private equity firms to the benefit of the state and the great disbenefit and cost of the inmates.
There is plenty of explanation and exposition in The Bezzle but it is fascinating and engagingly delivered by Hench. The whole story is also pretty depressing as Doctrow, through Hench takes apart the greed that fuels American society and the breaks constantly being given to big business at the expense of the populace all in the name of making money. So The Bezzle is a bit of an angry book, but Hench never gets angry, he just methodically gets even, which is much more satisfying.
In the Martin Hench books Cory Doctrow has created an unlikely but extremely likeable hero who gives him a vehicle for exploring and exposing the worst of American corporate excess. The Bezzle is a fascinating and scary look at what Doctrow calls the “shitty technology adoption curve” where “tech’s worst ideas are sanded down on the bodies of the people least able to defend themselves… before those bad ideas are imposed on the rest of us.” And with the inexorable rise of technology these issue impact on all of our lives and we can only take action if we understand them.

A great read
Who knew a book that is mostly about money could be so readable! It’s not that I haven’t heard of money laundering or shell companies just that I don’t really understand them. And then there are other ways of getting money from people that I’ve haven’t even heard of. And I love the title!
Nonetheless, I was able to follow and enjoy this book, which seemed at times to be all about those things and, naturally, about the people who own, make and steal this money. But it was also about friendship and loyalty and included a complicated money related plot. And it made me think, unusually, about how prisoner’s lives are funded and how they too can be stolen from and how truly different the States of America are from each other.
A lot to think about wrapped up in a lively plot with interesting characters. I definitely recommend this book.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

As someone whose profession is in an adjacent field to the protagonist (though with waaaay much less excitement and restoring justice to the world), I was totally excited to see a book that gives an investigator of white collar crime a spot in the limelight. But I really enjoyed the book not just for that relatable professional angle: there is so much raw hate for the crimes perpetuated institutionally, in the name of late stage capitalism, that I think it's hard to remain neutral when you're taken along the journey. It definitely makes it very easy to root for the main character. As someone else commented, the book has too much reality in it for everything to be sunshine and rainbows at the end, but -- one step at a time.

Fascinating, scathing and disturbing. This was pretty terrifying reading, especially for someone living in the UK who’s been watching everything being privatised, especially our beloved NHS.
Money breeds contempt and corruption, I honestly don’t know why we teach their brand of success as being aspirational.
This was excellent, really entertaining and enjoyable, I am looking forward to reading the first book in this series. The characters were really well written, and I loved the friendship between Marty and Scott. It showed what is really important in life.

3.5 stars. I enjoyed aspects of this. Cory Doctorow has a lot of writing talent, but for some reason, I just didn't love it.

Martin Hench is a forensic accountant. Now, before you go running away screaming, let me reassure you that the book is worth your time and you will not be bored! For starters, Marty is going to tell you the story behind how he knows *so* much about America’s prison system, despite never having been incarcerated. Along the way you’ll learn about all the nastiest, most ingrained corruption in the ‘Land of the Free’, from shell companies to financial shenanigans of all kinds. If we’re lucky, at least some of the rich and ruthless will have their fun spoiled. And it all kicks off with some hamburgers…

The Bezzle is a tough book to categorise. It’s not exactly a mystery, it’s definitely not sci-fi, but ‘thriller’ implies a lot more action and danger than we get. Although there is a lot of physical danger in the second half, in particular, but by then it was almost disappointing to leave the utter intrigue of the story up to that point for something so mundane as being beaten up or victimised by corrupt cops. Oh, spoiler? No, don’t worry – you get to wonder how exactly we get to that point!

Marty is an easy character to like. He’s very very good at what he does, and he choses to do it for good causes, and only enough to pay for him to enjoy life in between cases. So, he’ll help catch the cheating spouse trying to hide his millions in the divorce settlement, or uncover where the corrupt execs have siphoned off billions before declaring a tax write off. It doesn’t *sound* exciting, and it’s not really ‘exciting’, but boy was it gripping. It’s very easy to read, to follow along with the story telling, and need to know how it’s all going to pan out.

I wasn’t quite as hooked by the end. It remains a great story, but it is very set in reality and frankly reality sucks. While there is some satisfaction to be had, there was a whole lot more that just felt unfair, unjust, and extremely frustrating – and it’s how it really is out there. Meh.

Still, it was a good little read overall, not outstaying its welcome. I’m absolutely going to find myself a copy of Red Team Blues, the first Martin Hench book. This one is, I believe, set earlier (all told by Marty in flashback), but it’ll be good to find out more about how Marty’s life progresses, as he applies that ‘very special set of skills’ and tips the scales – occasionally – in the right way.

Doctorow's Red Team Blues was one of my favourites books of 2023, so I was excited to read the follow-up. It doesn't disappoint, and The Bezzle is maybe even better (though that could be recency bias). The second book jumps back to 2006, where our intrepid hero Marty Hench finds himself on the island of Catalina off the coast of LA.

I described Red Team Blues as a Travis McGee novel set in the world of crypto.
This one is more like . . . bizarro William Gibson.

Hard to categorise, but it does a fantastic job like Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy of examining the modern world, how crazy it is, and where reality starts to bleed into sci-fi. Marty Hench is a forensic accountant, and in a similar fashion to Travis McGee he works as a salvage specialist - recovering stolen funds and keeping a % for himself.

This is actually an ingenious way for Doctorow to explore different things in the same way a classic PI novel allowed the main character to move through a variety of social circles. These days, you have to 'follow the money' to truly figure things out.

Doctorow keeps the tone breezy and cool once again. We start out with a Ponzi scheme built around fast food (it makes perfect sense in the book, don't worry) before dipping into the abject horror of America's for-profit prison system. I'm not sure how much of this stuff is factually accurate or embellished for the sake of the plot - honestly I suspect very close to little if any.

The writing is smart, never overly didactic, which is always a risk when dealing with certain themes and subjects. It also somehow retains an element of levity, but you're never in doubt about the stakes involved. There are fascinating detours into music publishing and sampling law, fantasy novels, and a lot of psychedelic drug use.

The whole thing is scaffolded by a thriller/mystery plot that keeps the momentum going. I was worried that the story had painted itself into a corner that could only be resolved by a deus ex machina ending, but it races to a finale that feels both genuine and earned.

Cannot recommend this one enough, and here's hoping Marty Hench comes back to make this a trilogy (or more).

Disclaimer: I was not aware when reading this book that Martin Hench was a recurring character and had not read 'Red Team Blues'. Having said that, I didn't find it detracted from my following of this story, and enjoyed it on its' own merits.
This was an interesting one: as I started reading the first 10-15% felt a bit like the scenes in The Firm where Mitch McDeere first goes to the Cayman Islands: we get lots of luxury living description and 'wealthy people visiting' scenarios and I was beginning to wonder where this was all going. It soon becomes clear why this opening section is important and how it shapes the narrative as a whole as a seemingly minor incident becomes something much bigger.
'Traditional' thriller readers may find it a little business/ accounting heavy - at times it reminded me of one of the more engaging articles in the Harvard Business Review as it detailed tech and business finances. If that sounds like a negative it's not meant to be, merely an observation that this might not be a book for those who don't have some interest in the world of big corporations and the shadier sides of business. It's more spreadsheet analysis than running from the mob - although there's certainly a physical risk running throughout the book.
I wasn't so sure with the protagonist's 'narration' overview sprinkled throughout the story: it didn't really seem to add much to the narrative as a whole (I have no idea if this was a feature of the first book) but it was a minor element that didn't affect my reading.
Overall this was a short read (249 pages print length) that kept me engaged and I'll certainly go on to check out the first book in the series as a result.

I like Martin Hench's character very much, but I liked the first adventure better, although this one had more compelling characters. Unfortunately, the story itself, in my opinion, suffers a downturn in the middle that makes the whole thing very cumbersome to follow, almost as if the author had (again) used a fictional story to explain some of the horrible things that happen-or have happened, or continue to happen-in the United States.
Of course he did it on purpose, no doubt for anyone who has at least once dealt with this Doctorow, the problem, however, is that when fiction becomes a bibliographical thesis, the dilemma for the reader who cares more about the story than, in this case, the drama of American prisoners, is trudging along. I speak for a friend clearly. That aside, I anxiously await the third volume of the trilogy to find out how Martin Hench became the characters I have come to love.

Mi piace moltissimo il personaggio di Martin Hench, ma la prima avventura mi era piaciuta di piú, anche se questa aveva dei personaggi piú avvincenti. Purtroppo la storia in sé, subisce secondo me una flessione a metá che rende il tutto molto macchinoso da seguire, quasi che l'autore avesse (anche stavolta) utilizzato una storia di fantasia per spiegare alcune cose orribili che succedono - o che sono accadute, o continuano ad accadere - negli Stati Uniti. Ovvio che lo ha fatto a posta, non ci sono dubbi per chiunque abbia almeno una volta avuto a che fare con questo autore, il problema peró é che quando la narrativa diventa una tesi bibliografica, il dilemma per il lettore a cui interessa piú la storia che, in questo caso il dramma dei carcerati americani, si trova nell'arrancare. Parlo per un amico chiaramente. A parte questo, aspetto ansiosamente il terzo volume della trilogia, per scoprire come Martin Hench é diventato i personaggio che ho imparato ad amare.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.