• Title: Red Team Blues
• Author: Cory Doctorow
• # of Pages: 224 (ebook)

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.

I ran across Cory Doctorow’s Kickstarter campaign for Red Team Blues while browsing the website for fun stuff to buy, a bad habit I have when feeling sad. I was never one for window shopping, but I guess now that you can do it sitting down, even I have taken the bait.

I’ve read two Cory Doctorow books in the past year, Little Brother (which I reviewed here), and Radicalized. I’ve been a big fan ever since, so when I saw the campaign I immediately hopped on, without even caring what exactly the story was going to be about. In fact, I actually noticed the plot mentioned blockchain and thought to myself “ooh, maybe with Cory Doctorow’s explanations I’ll finally actually understand”. To me, Little Brother was the perfect ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) intro to cryptography that I needed, bundled into a fast-paced, easy to read story. 

Red Team Blues was not quite that. Actually, Doctorow never meant for it to be that either. How do I know? I asked him! At a fantastic talk he gave in Oxford back in May, I asked him how he decided how much to explain and how much to leave to the reader when it came to the techy bits in his books, and his answer surprised me; paraphrasing here, he said he’d explain things that were of relevance to the story, but that he relied on our access to google for he most part. My surprise was due to the fact that Little Brother had felt extremely descriptive to me, what with its main character being a kid constantly explaining things to others. 

But as I said, Red Team Blues was not like that. I found myself googling quite a bit to get the basics of blockchain and secure keys, although in retrospect most of it wasn’t necessary for the story. In fact, to be perfectly honest, the actual plot twists and even final resolution relied a lot more on mafia-style action rather than tech. While the book was a page turner, mostly due to its easy to read flow, by the time I finished it I didn’t really see how the blockchain background contributed at all. It seemed mainly a way to build background for the main character and give him some fancy monologues. The final punch that solved the problem wasn’t very sophisticated, and I had a hard time understanding why it had taken that long to get there.

As with Little Brother, this book also has an awkward flow at times. In what I assume was an attempt to be diverse, more than once characters are directly described as “Black”, for example “My berth had a view of the lake and a nice Black family next door […]”. While I appreciate Doctorow’s intent since in many cases, when writers choose to not mention race at all, we by default assume everyone is white (until those writers pull a Rowling a decade later), there probably could have been less painfully obvious ways to diversify the cast. 

So, will I read the next one? The answer is still a yes. Red Blue Team has an unusual main character – sixty seven year old Marty Hench. Old white men POVs aren’t unique, but giving them casual, respectful romance stories with women their own age is. Moreover, the idea of forensic accounting is fascinating, and I am holding out some hope that the next book has a bit more tech along with the action. And at the end of the day, Little Brother and Radicalized were fantastic enough to make me a Cory Doctorow fangirl, even if this one was a bit of a miss for me.