Difference between revisions of "Bleeding Edge"
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<div style="text-align:center; margin-bottom:1em">"New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn't going to tell it." – Donald E. Westlake</div> | <div style="text-align:center; margin-bottom:1em">"New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn't going to tell it." – Donald E. Westlake</div> | ||
| − | [[File:BE- | + | [[File:BE-Final-Cover.jpg|350px|thumb|''Bleeding Edge''<br />'''Cover design:''' Evan Gaffney<br />'''Jacket Image:''' Luis Martinez/LuisMMolina//Getty Images<br />'''Publication date:''' Sep 17, 2013|right]] It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left. |
Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics — carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts — without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom — two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex- husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood — till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. | Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics — carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts — without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom — two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex- husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood — till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course. | ||
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* [[Bleeding Edge description|More on the book description]] | * [[Bleeding Edge description|More on the book description]] | ||
* [[Errata]] | * [[Errata]] | ||
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| + | ==Jonathan Cape Edition – United Kingdom== | ||
| + | '''Published:''' September 17, 2013 | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Cover:''' Same as the Penguin Books cover, BUT without the cool refracting color effect. The Jonathan Cape edition is flat grayscale. | ||
| + | |||
| + | '''Pagination:''' Same as the Penguin Books edition, 477 pages. | ||
Latest revision as of 13:10, 24 September 2013
Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics — carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts — without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom — two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex- husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood — till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.
With occasional excursions into the Deep Web and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.
Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?
Hey. Who wants to know?
Jonathan Cape Edition – United Kingdom
Published: September 17, 2013
Cover: Same as the Penguin Books cover, BUT without the cool refracting color effect. The Jonathan Cape edition is flat grayscale.
Pagination: Same as the Penguin Books edition, 477 pages.
