Bleeding Edge: A Novel

The Washington Post Brilliantly written a joy to read Bleeding Edge is totally gonzo totally wonderful It really is good to have Thomas Pynchon around doing what he does best Michael Dirda 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 With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb 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