The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow
The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow
List: $25.00 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.50

The Bezzle

Author: Cory Doctorow

Narrator: Wil Wheaton

Unabridged: 8 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Cory Doctorow

Published: 02/20/2024


Synopsis

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.
The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.
Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.
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 sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.

About Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Locus, and many other publications. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an MIT Media Lab Research Associate and a visiting professor of Computer Science at the Open University. His award-winning novel Little Brother and its sequel Homeland were a New York Times bestsellers. His novella collection Radicalized was a CBC Best Fiction of 2019 selection. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

Goodreads review by OutlawPoet on December 06, 2023

This is not an exciting book. It *is* an utterly fascinating book. As an L.A. native, I simply loved the history here of everything from L.A. to Catalina. I loved the fact that I knew every intersection mentioned in the book. But it definitely wasn’t exciting. It’s a methodical study of California – ra......more

Goodreads review by Kara on April 07, 2024

You’re not paranoid, the saying goes, if they are actually out to get you. That’s what Scott Warms and his friend, narrator Marty Hench, learns in The Bezzle. Cory Doctorow tackles the unscrupulous American private prison system in this book, demonstrating how capitalism’s death grip on the carceral......more

Goodreads review by Eilonwy on April 06, 2024

This second techno-finance mystery (is that a genre?) featuring hidden-money-sleuth Martin Hench was just as good as the first. Rather than following from the first book, it starts 20 years in the past, so it doesn't matter if you read this book without reading the previous one. These are short and......more

Goodreads review by James on February 03, 2024

A (relatively) focused plot, a convincingly diabolical villain and most of all, absolutely chock full of interesting tidbits and insights into scams, pyramid schemes, copyright law, tax auditing, the prison-industrial complex and other fascinating, important topics well-suited to Martin Hench, foren......more

Goodreads review by Caitlin on February 20, 2024

Thanks to NetGalley for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review. The Bezzle is the second book in the Martin Hench series. Hench is a forensic accountant, helping companies find missing money. He makes enough money to live comfortably on, and is able to do his own side work. After he upsets some o......more