4 results for "Novel"

The bezzle

Doctorow, Cory
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 twenty-five dollars. 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.
Tor Publishing Group 2024-02-20 230 pages

Picks and shovels

Doctorow, Cory
THE YEAR IS 1986. THE CITY IS SAN FRANCISCO. Here, Martin Hench will reinvent the forensic accountant for the digital age - what a bounty hunter is to people, he will be to tech money - but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever. When Martin is hired by a Silicon Valley startup, Fidelity Computing, to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor, he quickly realises he's on the wrong side. Martin ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women have set out to beat Fidelity Computing at their own game. But they have no idea of the depth of evil they're seeking to uproot. Or the risks they run. In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.
Head of Zeus 2025-09-11 400 pages

Someone comes to town, someone leaves town

Doctorow, Cory
With Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe , Cory Doctorow established himself as one of the leading voices of next-generation SF: inventive, optimistic, and comfortable with the sheer strangeness of tomorrow. Now Doctorow returns with a novel of wrenching oddity, heartfelt technological vision, and human pity set on the streets of Toronto today. Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in the bohemian neighborhood of Kensington. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings--wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off. Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain; his mother is a washing machine; and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls. Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick, are on his doorstep--well on their way to starvation, because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, who Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned...bent on revenge. Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city's dumpsters. But Alan's past won't leave him alone--and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and all his friends. Wildly imaginative, constantly whipsawing us between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.
Tor Books 2005-07 315 pages