Peter Baran's Reviews > Red Team Blues

There's a loose-limbed quality to Cory Doctorow's Red Ream Blues that fits the age of its protagonist. A 67-year-old forensic accountant who has worked in tech all of his life, when - yep - that could be a thing. A fixer for those who have been hacked, scammed or otherwise bamboozled he is a self-described red team player, ie he works in offense, its his job to find the flaws in systems that others might have utilised. A very different job to the blue team, trying to create unbreakable security. Red Team only has to find one flaw.

What it is, and Doctorow certainly doesn't hide this, is a soft-boiled PI story, an investigator doing one last job for a friend and coming up against organised crime, dames to die for and a McGuffin in and around the cryptocurrency. But this is a Doctorow character and one that seems quite personal, so he may have red team blues but he's wearing a white hat as he plays with the black hats in his green vehicles. There is an element of a shaggy dog story here too, as the initial case is solved in the first third, time passes and things slowly pick up again. Its episodic nature also gives Doctorow an opportunity to play around with another aspect of dot-com millionaire rarely considered - what do you do with all that money when you've spent most of your life eating packet Ramen.

There is much to be said for the vibe of Red Team Blues, even if it does contain the kind of murder and death-toll I would expect of a Dashiel Hammet. At the same time there are moments when it feels like Doctorow is running through his take on dot com morality, maybe I am jaded with the negatives of crypto and the moral ambivalence of the techbros. Also he basically sets up three femme fatels and pays off none of them, in what feels like a stab at gender equality takes an essential building block out of the form. Nevertheless if you want to read a de-tech-tive novel, and one where the lead is unfailingly nice to everyone, you won't find a better example.