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 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?
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