Marek reviewed The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow (Martin Hench, #2)
Blood boiling financial thriller
4 stars
Content warning No specific spoilers, but commentary which you might want to avoid if you want to read it wholly fresh.
Doctorow knew he was on to something when he came up with Marty Hench, and he was right.
Red Team Blues was Hench's last case, so this is an earlier one - set across more than a decade from the mid-2000s to the late teens. It includes Doctorow at his expositional best - wrapping explainers on class crime, financial crime, and corruption in light tissues of noir thriller in a way that will be leave your blood boiling and your guts churning with how despicable and unjust are the systems in which people are caught up in the States (in particular, California). (The particular problems associated with privatised prison systems are likely specific to the US, though general points about corruption in the legal and carceral systems are probably a bit more general.)
Hench himself keeps that same aura of competence porn and bloody-mindedness that makes him an appealing noir detective, and the pettiness and venality of his opponents I guess will likely be unavoidable across all of the stories we're likely to see here.
Doctorow presents an uncomfortable ending which was not supposed to satisfy, but to me was a little too weak on a key aspect such that it didn't quite land. All in all though, a good example of Doctorow doing what he does well.
