Description
Book SynopsisMoney-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.Trade Review'A fast-paced, voraciously readable thriller that lays bare the financial rot at the core of Silicon Valley's high-minded rhetoric of innovation.' - Roger McNamee, author of
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe 'I showed up for the high-tech ideas and stayed for the whodunit. You don't need to be a techie to love
Red Team Blues – you just need to be fascinated about what the future might hold.' - A. G. Riddle, author of
Lost in Time 'Well, talk about timely. In the wake of the late-2022 collapse of cryptocurrency comes this novel about a forensic accountant who’s hired to work a case involving electronic theft of cryptocurrency... Doctorow's novels are always feasts for the imagination and the intellect, and this one is no exception: it’s jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto, and its near-future world is lovingly detailed and completely believable.' -
BookList 'Cory Doctorow's fiction is a vector through which he offers incisive commentary on technology and society, and
Red Team Blues is no exception. Through the eyes of a grizzled forensic accountant, we're forced to question preconceived ideas around benevolent billionaires, honorable state authorities, and impenetrable security.
Red Team Blues earns its spot in the top echelon of thriller novels that give you no choice but to devour them in one sitting, but leave you thinking long after you turn the last page.' -- Molly White
