Red Team Blues

Seriously. Martin Hench is a fantastic character. There is nothing about him or his journey through this novel that I would change.

As always, Doctorow has gotten all of the details right. As an infosec professional, I appreciate that level of research and commitment to verisimilitude. This is a fast paced thriller about... financial and tech crime... I know that sounds weird, and it is even weirder that the main character is essentially an accountant, but it works so well.

I also love that he's old. He's been around the block a time or 7. He knows his shit. He's the last of a dying breed. The computing revolutionaries from MIT. He was at the cutting edge of forensic computing and accounting. But those days are long in his past. Now he's dealing with cryptocurrency. The blockchain. All that other gross crap that tech-bros have come up with. But he's able to cut through the bullshit and use his smarts and his knowledge of tactics to beat them at their own game. It is seriously an awesome story.

There are so many deep characters in this book. A lot of them would be worthy of their own novels. None of the side characters or relationships seem fake or two dimensional.

Overall, if you like mysteries or thrillers, are into tech, or just love good character driven books, this is for you.

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.

I finished @pluralistic’s #RedTeamBlues this evening, and I would highly - highly - recommend it! It’s a short read, just a tad over 200 pages but it’s quite engrossing. I probably could have finished it last night, but I forced myself to sleep instead.

I really like Doctorow’s writing style, and I always learn some new words (and not just technological ones) when I read his books. One of my favorite hallmarks of his fiction is the use of what I would term “non-standard” protagonists - in this case a 67-year-old confirmed bachelor facing retirement. Definitely not someone I would have expected to be enmeshed with a cast of Very Ruthless People ™️ and crypto-bros. That alone makes the stories so much more relatable and entertaining to me and easier to identify with. And as always, the more technical elements of the plot are thoroughly well-researched and expertly woven together like an episode of #MrRobot, but explained in an accessible and easy-to-follow manner.

If you’re looking for a short(ish) techno-thriller to read with a page-turning plot, this book should be right up your alley. That ain’t no lie, cutie pie.