Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
book, review
5/5 stars
A wonderful end to the trilogy.
The Martin Hench series revolves around the eponymous Marty, who’s a forensic accountant. Tracking down money — mainly money its owners want to hide. Going backwards, the first book (Red Team Blues) was about the "one last job" while this one sees Marty in his college years and early adulthood.
He’s hired by three religious leaders who provide repurposed Aple II computers to their congregation. It soon becomes clear that rather than serving their users’s specific needs, they milk them for every penny they’ve got using tactics that are extremely resonant to today’s acts of enshittification: their computers only accept the matching floppies (which are sold at a significant markup), ditto for their printer paper, not to mention their printers being engineered to jam more often, requiring (paid, of course) technical support.
And when their three most prominent sales women leave, start their own company freeing these systems up and try to recruit Marty to their side, things really get going.
This is a techno thriller true to its word: full of now "vintage" technology (this is the eighties, baby) with march against time, reverse-engineering, coding, violence and partying.
One of the things I really enjoyed here is that Marty being in his early twenties, he has a tendency to be a bit self-assured and knowing he’s smart, he believes that things come easily to him — without the hard work "normal people" need.
So early on, he meets someone who’s a really good listener. He observes this, pays attention and then for most of the book operates under the conviction that he is a fantastic listener as well. Only to be brought down, hard.
Marty’s a great character, but the author’s always ready to call out his hubris and take him down a peg. These scenes are always a delight not just because it’s funny to see the overconfident guy fall but also because this provides a genuine growth, painful as it is.
The book is funny, but gets quite emotional and dark at places. With rich and powerful people as their enemies, the protagonists don’t always leave unscathed. There’s a melancholic undercurrent in throughout the series.
But all of this makes for a fantastic reading. Do not open Picks and Shovels in the evening!
And as ever, the audiobook is narrated by Wil Wheaton who, as ever, is absolutely amazing.
This review was originally posted to Goodreads.
