Reviews

Cory Doctorow's best writing so far. It's a wide-ranging narrative that interlaces hamburger Ponzi schemes, for-profit prison abuses, and record label financial chicanery in Doctorow's inimitable fashion. The story ricochets through its beats to produce an exciting, informative, and sometimes enraging tale that is memorable and thought-provoking.
This book is not politically-neutral; there is no sympathy or silence here for neo-liberal and conservative politics. The author is an avowed leftist with bona fides for advancing the causes of social justice and individual privacy. Doctorow's protagonists usually give a voice to his own opinions.
Marty Hench, the protagonist, is a forensic accountant living in San Francisco through the late '90s up to the late '10s. As such, the book often diverts in long passages detailing one or another technical aspect of information forensics, personal technology, and legal theory. It's all relevant - if not obviously so - to the plot, but some readers may not appreciate that aspect.
The story concludes abruptly and eschews happily-ever-after for a satisfyingly real end to this chapter in Marty Hench's life.

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

5.0

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 bow. I'll definitely be reading whatever Marty Hench book he writes next, and of course, remain a fan of Doctorow's work overall.