Red Team Blues

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow (2023 TOR e-book 213pp)

 

Cory Doctorow is a well-respected author who has become something of an activist, railing against surveillance, copyright, corporate financial fraud and the general “enshittification” (his own term) of online services and companies once they grow so large that they approach monopolies. All the books I’ve previously read by him contain a certain level of polemic but usually mixed in with an entertaining and sharply-written plot.

I’m glad to say “Red Team Blues” is no different as it tells the tale of the last case of hard-bitten 67-year-old forensic accountant Marty Hench. Hench has been living a nomadic life travelling across the US in a converted rock band touring bus. He’s dying to find somewhere to settle down and enjoy his retirement.

Then his old friend Danny Lazer gets in touch and hires Marty to find some missing encryption keys that he probably shouldn’t have been in possession of in the first place. Marty accepts the job and soon finds himself neck-deep in murders, crooked lawyers and warring criminal gangs.

Doctorow has that hard-edged descriptive prose that you’d usually find in cyberpunk novels – technology and esoteric theories are laid out before the reader as the tension is increased.

Oddly Marty seems to be irresistible to women which seemed a little unbelievable. A lot of text is spent getting him into unavoidable intimate situations, perhaps a little bit of wish-fulfilment by the author.

My other problem with this book is that it’s very short – just over 200 pages. I felt like 75% of its length is building things up to a point then suddenly everything is resolved, most of it done ‘off-screen’

It seems we’re going to get the earlier adventures of Marty in forthcoming books by Doctorow, hopefully they’ll be longer and be resolved more satisfyingly.

I enjoyed this book, its very ‘now’ with issues like crypto-currency and so on. I fear it may age badly but for now its worth your time to read.