First Edition, 224 pages
English language
Published April 25, 2023 by Tor Books.
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.
Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.
Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s …
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works.
Martin Hench is 67 years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He lives and roams California in a very comfortable fully-furnished touring bus, The Unsalted Hash, that he bought years ago from a fading rock star. He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women, and they like him back often enough.
Martin is a—contain your excitement—self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He’s not famous, except to the people who matter. He’s made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he’s been paid pretty well. It’s been a good life.
Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before—and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.
Liked this story. Funny, imaginative and gives a little peek into the big money laundering, off-shoring and cryptocurrency business.
La novela no pasa el test de Bechdel porque va de un señor mayor en su súper autocaravana haciendo de detective friki. Muchas referencias tecnológicas de todo tipo que creo que sólo harán gracia a los que estamos en el sector y eso sin entrar en la parte sobre criptomonedas.
Si lees el blog del autor la novela entera son referencias a sus temas favoritos.
Unreadable for me. It's just a huge infodump showing off the author's knowledge and research, vaguely disguised by adding dialogue. But then the people talk like no real person I've ever met. DNF on page 17, that's how bad it is.
Enjoyed the plot (techno-thriller) but I found everything else (characters, settings, etc) very underdeveloped and skeletal. People and relationships seemed very flat and one-dimensional, so the story didn't have much depth. The plot is interesting and topical, and certainly open to more depth but Doctorow doesn't go there.
Not being a tech or finance person I could have used a bit more explanatory handholding at points to better grasp the implications of certain events I the story - I had to set aside some questions I had and just go with the flow.
I very much appreciate Doctorow's social media and blog posts, but this was the first time reading his longer works. There was enough here to try another one, but if this is typical of his style it just might not be my type.
No te va a molar si piensas que el blockchain lo soluciona todo. Por lo demás el libro está bien, pero me parece que falla un poco al final, un poco apresurado/rápido como resuelve todo.
An interesting thriller involving the super rich of Silicon Valley hiding and moving their money around to make more money, and an investigative accountant who works to penetrate the surrounding defences.
In tech-speak, he's a Red Team person who hates to be one defending the accounts against attacks (Blue Team). But in this story, as he works to recover some lost digital keys before they can be used to manipulate digital financial ledgers that should not be alterable, he finds himself in the middle of a dispute between money-laundering families, and is marked for death for acts that he didn't commit. Now, he has to become a Blue Team person, defending against the attacks of the thugs out to get him. But the solution to his problem may involve being a Red Team member again.
A fast moving story with interesting technical details about cryptocurrencies, security and living among the …
An interesting thriller involving the super rich of Silicon Valley hiding and moving their money around to make more money, and an investigative accountant who works to penetrate the surrounding defences.
In tech-speak, he's a Red Team person who hates to be one defending the accounts against attacks (Blue Team). But in this story, as he works to recover some lost digital keys before they can be used to manipulate digital financial ledgers that should not be alterable, he finds himself in the middle of a dispute between money-laundering families, and is marked for death for acts that he didn't commit. Now, he has to become a Blue Team person, defending against the attacks of the thugs out to get him. But the solution to his problem may involve being a Red Team member again.
A fast moving story with interesting technical details about cryptocurrencies, security and living among the rich and the homeless. However, the story does skip putting in more details that might bore the average layman, but would give more technical depth to the story and make it feel just a little less 'hand wavy' in the way the story get resolved.
This is a kinetic thriller dealing with cryptocurrency, organized crime, and homelessness. I'm not typically drawn to thrillers without some splash of speculative fiction mixed in heavily, but Doctorow has created something special here that will bring me back for the next two novels in this series.
A cute techno-thriller, this time focused on an aging retiring accountant rather than a YA scene, and the usual cogent and analytical depictions of today's hyped technologies and social implications. In this case, when money is no object, which cheapens most of the choices.
Fun story of the precautions the main character did to hide his tracks from powerful people that were looking for him. That being said the story didnt have the overarching lesson or message that Doctorow's books normally have such as avoiding copyright over-reach. This was just a good story about electronic surveillance with some cryptocoin elements.
What a tremendous combination of modern technology and the best kind of sparse detective story. There were a couple of editorial choices that I found jarring, but otherwise just loved the story. I could see Philip Marlowe getting caught up in this kind of thing, he just didn't have Signal and Tor at his disposal.
Can't wait for the next one!
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 …
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.
This was Doctorow at his finest. Its a fast paced book that is very nerdy and very fun.
Recommend this to all of your techie friends. Also for all of your finance friends. Also for all of your friends who have fallen into the dark world of crypto culture...maybe this will help them out.
Never forget - crypto means cryptography!
I really liked this. Imagine a 67 year old main character! With an old rock star tour bus. Who's an accountant. Lots of money, blocks, chains and keys floating around. And retirement.
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 …
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.
Though billed as forensic accounting thriller, I found the book to be a little light on action and tension to merit the word 'thriller.' But our book's hero does have some moments where bad actors are closing in. Caught in the middle of someone else's fight, with doubtful allies from the government, the story does intrigue, and I was lucky to start reading it on a rainy Sunday because I got nothing else done once my nose was in this book. Recommended.
