Red Team Blues

I haven't read everything by Doctorow, but have been reading him long enough to see what I think is an interesting progression in his writing. His work in the last few years (from the exceptional "Walkaway", to the superb novella collection "Radicalized"), has seemed increasingly readable and smooth. I think it's probably no coincidence that the stories seem to be getting a little shorter too (mostly, "Walkaway" has a certain heft).

His latest, "Red Team Blues", is a financial tech thriller set in Silicon Valley, in which an itinerant, grizzled forensic accountant, Marty Hench, is drawn into a hunt for crucial McGuffin, one that threatens the foundations of a cryptocurrency network.

Hench as a character is a nice clash of genres. On the one hand, he's a like a gritty noir detective - a loner, connected but never settled (literally, he lives on a tour bus), no time or patience for bullshit. On the other, he's lives and breathes the most bullshit-ridden ecosystem in existence. As he gets caught up in, and tossed back and forth by, forces vying for control of cryptocurrency, Hench splits his time between the magical looms of the emperor's new clothes and the actual streets of San Francisco.

The plot is interesting, but what keeps the reader involved is Hench's no-nonsense getting on with things. His superpower is to move among those who spend their lives playing games and not lose sight of how things actually work, when you look past the hype of constant revolutionary presmises offered by the techbois. What's interesting here is that while Doctorow does give you some of the tech-lore involved, it plays much less of a role than it does in a lot of his work. He is much more interested, here, in contrasting the lives of the rich and how those lives bulldoze, trample, and otherwise destroy people in the world around them. There isn't much technical detail here, particularly of the forensic accounting bit, most of which occurs "off screen". We get a lot more time taken describing cooking of food than cooking of books. Oddly, I wouldn't have minded a little more on the technical end.

It's pace and brevity are definitely in its favour. If you want a sharp, easy-to-read, thriller with Doctorow's signature combination of tech and humanity, you'll enjoy this one.

Unbelievably good and probably will end up as my 'book of the year'. There was a lot of anticipation around this with Doctorow's own editor calling it a 'barn burner' on reading the first draft. I can safely say that the all the hype was fully lived up to. This .... soared. On the face of it, a tale of an accountant in his late 60's getting up to shenanigans in Silicon Valley is not really a premise that sounds like it will work. It so, did. A lot of ground was covered in this novel, it had a breathless tone at times when it was jumping from one thing to the next. Skewering cryptobro culture, examining homelessness in one of the richest cities in the world, dealing with morality and considerations of trust. Look, if you like a good thriller. Read this. If you want some insight into some of the current factors at play in the tech world. Read this. If you like good books. Just. Read. This. I thought Doctorow's last novel was an absolute triumph. This tops it. It's just that good. Obviously recommended.