New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares. 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 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy. A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares. The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. 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. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Martin Hench
Martin Hench
6 books in catalog
Speculative fiction and digital rights advocacy intersect in a prolific body of work that examines surveillance, internet policy, copyright, and post-scarcity economics. Cory Doctorow established himself as a prominent voice in modern science fiction and tech journalism through novels that address how technology shapes human freedom and social systems, including his best-selling young adult novel Little Brother.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on July 17, 1971, Doctorow attended alternative schools and worked at Bakka Bookstore before dropping out of high school at age seventeen. That same year, he sold his first story, '2,000 Year Check-up,' to the Canadian speculative fiction magazine On Spec. After briefly living in Mexico and attending four universities in two years, he attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 1992. His first professional sale, 'Craphound,' appeared in Science Fiction Age in 1998 and was nominated for the Aurora and Sturgeon Awards.
Beyond his fiction writing, Doctorow has built an extensive career as an activist, blogger, and journalist. He served as the European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, co-founded the Open Rights Group in the UK, and spent years as a co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. Having lived in Toronto, London, and other cities, he continues to publish technology critique and fiction while advocating for Creative Commons licensing and open access standards.
Doctorow's writing frequently focuses on the political and legal tensions inherent in digital technology, with recurring themes such as digital rights management, file sharing, copyright liberalization, anti-monopoly economics, and open-source computation. His speculative worlds often feature technologist protagonists who use technical knowledge, civil disobedience, and collaborative problem-solving to counter corporate overreach and government surveillance.
Whether writing solarpunk speculative fiction about climate hope or techno-thrillers about financial mechanisms, his narrative approach balances detailed technical realism with accessible explanations of economic and social concepts. He frequently releases his literary works under Creative Commons licenses, reflecting his personal commitment to accessible information and user autonomy.
6 books in catalog
Speculative fiction and digital rights advocacy intersect in a prolific body of work that examines surveillance, internet policy, copyright, and post-scarcity economics. Cory Doctorow established himself as a prominent voice in modern science fiction and tech journalism through novels that address how technology shapes human freedom and social systems, including his best-selling young adult novel Little Brother.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on July 17, 1971, Doctorow attended alternative schools and worked at Bakka Bookstore before dropping out of high school at age seventeen. That same year, he sold his first story, '2,000 Year Check-up,' to the Canadian speculative fiction magazine On Spec. After briefly living in Mexico and attending four universities in two years, he attended the Clarion Writers' Workshop in 1992. His first professional sale, 'Craphound,' appeared in Science Fiction Age in 1998 and was nominated for the Aurora and Sturgeon Awards.
Beyond his fiction writing, Doctorow has built an extensive career as an activist, blogger, and journalist. He served as the European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, co-founded the Open Rights Group in the UK, and spent years as a co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. Having lived in Toronto, London, and other cities, he continues to publish technology critique and fiction while advocating for Creative Commons licensing and open access standards.
Doctorow's writing frequently focuses on the political and legal tensions inherent in digital technology, with recurring themes such as digital rights management, file sharing, copyright liberalization, anti-monopoly economics, and open-source computation. His speculative worlds often feature technologist protagonists who use technical knowledge, civil disobedience, and collaborative problem-solving to counter corporate overreach and government surveillance.
Whether writing solarpunk speculative fiction about climate hope or techno-thrillers about financial mechanisms, his narrative approach balances detailed technical realism with accessible explanations of economic and social concepts. He frequently releases his literary works under Creative Commons licenses, reflecting his personal commitment to accessible information and user autonomy.
