The Bezzle (Red Team book 2) by Cory Doctorow (book review).
‘The Bezzle’ by Cory Doctorow is the second novel in the ‘Red Team’ series about cybercrime. This is the return of our forensic accountant, Marty Hench, who is doing his best to thwart cyberfraud. However, this is set in his past before ‘Red Team Blues’. We have Marty telling his story about how he knows so much about prisons in the USA without serving a jail term himself..
This covers the dot-com period of 2006 until 2017, so it must be taken as an alternative history to the world I think I know. Well, it ought to be. Yet, there is just enough wiggle room in the novel to allow the reader to think it could have really happened, allowing for name changes to protect Marty from court cases. Certainly, a lot of the background turns out to be fact.
Take the definition of the word ‘bezzle’ as an example. According to Marty, John Kenneth Galbraith came up with the term, which derives from embezzlement. ‘It’s the ‘weeks, months, or years that ‘elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. This is the period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who is being embezzled feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.’ Yes, those words, with some very slight artistic license for setting them in the context of the novel, can be found on websites like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Of course, this is the American definition. Us Brits have a more down-to-earth one: plunder or spoil and consume to excess (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th Edition).
This is one of those stories that starts with an inciting incident that causes an issue, triggers a problem, morphs into a struggle, and turns into an emergency. The inciting incident here is the discovery of a Ponzi scheme selling hamburgers on the Island of Catalina off the Los Angeles coast. You saw right, hamburgers! In 2006, they were selling for $25 a burger. Yes, it was fraud. Of course, Marty and his friend Scott couldn’t let their local friend Antonio be sucked into the fraud, nor could all the other locals who by then had been drawn into the same scheme. The forensic accountant got to work to identify how to bring the whole scheme down, or more precisely, who low down in the scheme could demand his payment to crash the whole thing into the pyramid by then. Naturally, it means the man at the top of the scheme stops getting his revenue, which, at a whopping $25 a burger, was a nice big earner. The man at the top, Lionel Coleman Junior, was really upset about it. He vowed revenge on Marty and Scott.
Scott turned out to be the easier target to get at. Things just got bigger and crazier from there. When I say crazier, any sane person would not believe it if they were just told what the situation was without any lead-up or explanation. Ways in which Cory Doctorow makes each plot move believable include quoting a relevant happenstance of true history, taking logic to its ultimate absurdity, and using literary writing techniques to make the point, such as there being no crime on Catalina Island just after Marty has described one.
This novel is peppered with humour, except for the few necessarily gruesome bits. It’s laughter most of the way through. It’s a light read, except when there is the need to follow multi-step crimes, particularly of the embezzling kind.
All the major loose ends get tied up except one: what is the real bezzle in this novel? By the time a reader asks this question, there have been so many convoluted crimes that it is only natural to think the bezzle has to be similarly complicated. But us Brits are more down to earth, which makes it far easier for us to figure it out.
I can well imagine that writer Cory Doctorow had fun writing this novel. It shows on every page. He even sprinkles a few well-known references to science fiction, if you grog them.
This is one of those thoroughly enjoyable cybercrime novels where some of the laughter comes from true life. But is it science fiction? Well, it certainly sends a science-fictional message about the dangers of the internet.
Rosie Oliver
February 2024
(pub: Head of Zeus, 2024. 230 page hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-80454-779-3)
check out website: www.headofzeus.com
