Cory Doctorow

Money-laundering, cyber-knavery and shell-company chicanery: Marty Hench is an expert in them all. He's Silicon Valley's most accomplished forensic accountant and well versed in the devious ways of Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (and there's more crossover than you might imagine). Cory Doctorow's hard-charging, read-in-one-sitting, techno take on the classic PI pulp novel. ** It's 2006, and Marty Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between the people who want to hide money and the people who want to find it. He spends his downtime holidaying on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost $25. (Wait, what?) When, during one vacation, Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme, he has no idea he's kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Because he's made his most dangerous mistake yet. He's trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and identified their latest target: California's Department of Corrections, who manage the state's prison system. Secure in the knowledge that they're living behind far too many firewalls to be identified, the tycoons have hundreds of thousands of prisoners at their mercy, and the potential of millions of pounds to make off them. But now, Marty is about to ruin their fun... 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 red-hot follow up to Red Team Blues.

The Bezzle

Katheryn

His definition of the bezzle was so great I memorized it. It's the weeks, months or years that elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. This is the period, incidentally, when the embezzled has his gain and the man who has been embezzled feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth. 

Let me give you a little life tip. If you are ever tempted to hold out hope that life will get better for America's prisoners, in even the tiniest ways, avoid that temptation.

America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It is not in our character. To be an American is to live with the festering background knowledge that you are in a land that imprison more of its people than any country in the history of the world—a land with more prsi9ners than Stalin's USSR or Hu Jintao's China or P. W. Botha's Apartheid South Africa.

With so many prisons, either you have to believe that you are living in the midst of a great many secret criminals, or you have to confront the fact that you live in a place where the only thing standing between you and decades in a prison (running at two or three times it's normal capacity) is luck . . . and connections.

The Bezzle quotes

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