The Bezzle
A Martin Hench Novel
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4.2 • 19 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.
The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. 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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doctorow's second financial thriller featuring forensic accountant Martin Hench (after 2023's Red Team Blues) prioritizes satire over realism, marring a plot centered on very real concerns about the privatization of prisons and the lead-up to the 2008 financial crash. In an alternate 2006, Hench vacations with his friend Scott Warms on Catalina Island, where he learns an island-wide ban on fast food has created a black market for In-N-Out burgers that turns out to be a pyramid scheme. His efforts to expose those at the top of the pyramid cause trouble for Warms, who ends up (unbelievably) pleading guilty to two felonies, risking life imprisonment under California's draconian Three Strikes Law. Warms is incarcerated in a facility run by SCAR, "a private-equity-funded ‘roll-up' of a dozen smaller prison companies," and Hench sets out to expose SCAR's fraudulent practices, hoping to help Warms on the inside. Doctorow paints in broad strokes here and though his points are well taken, they are not always well made. This disappoints.
