Red Team Blues was published by Tor Books in April 2023, the first in a planned Martin Hench series. Hench is not a hacker, a programmer, or a technologist in the usual Doctorow sense — he is a forensic accountant, a man who reads spreadsheets the way detectives read crime scenes. For forty years he has worked as a “red team” consultant in Silicon Valley: companies hire him to find their financial vulnerabilities before criminals do. He knows where the money goes and, more importantly, where it’s been hidden.
The plot begins when an old friend, Danny Lazer, asks Hench to investigate a cryptocurrency project that has gone sideways. Someone has stolen the private keys to a blockchain worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and the theft has left bodies behind. Hench’s investigation takes him through the layers of Silicon Valley’s financial underworld — venture capital, crypto exchanges, shell companies, offshore accounts — using skills that are entirely non-technical: reading balance sheets, following wire transfers, understanding the psychology of people who steal.
Doctorow’s decision to make his protagonist a senior citizen who works with spreadsheets rather than code is a deliberate inversion of tech-thriller conventions: the crime is committed with algorithms, but it’s solved with accounting. The novel is lean, propulsive, and mordantly funny — Hench narrates with the world-weary authority of a man who has seen every financial scam and is mildly disappointed when they repeat themselves.
Collecting Red Team Blues
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2023): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12
- Signed: $20–$50