The Bezzle is a novel written by Cory Doctorow. In the UK, it is published by Head of Zeus, and was released in February 2024. It is the second book in Doctorow’s Martin Hench series, though I was not aware of the previous book when I started reading. I have read the book in ebook format. This review is intended to be free of spoilers for the book, but some events, characters, and themes from later in the novel are alluded to. A review copy of the book was provided. There are affiliate links at the end of this review.
Blurb:
Money-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, The Bezzle is a red-hot follow up to Red Team Blues.
Review:
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 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.
Rating: 4 / 5
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