Red Team Blues (2023) launches Doctorow's Martin Hench series — a sequence of financial crime thrillers featuring a veteran Silicon Valley forensic accountant — and represents a significant formal departure from his previous fiction. Where the Little Brother series and walkaway use near-future speculation to make arguments about present conditions, Red Team Blues is set in a recognizable present-day Silicon Valley and uses the genre conventions of noir thriller to make arguments about cryptocurrency, fraud, and the culture of tech wealth.
Martin Hench and the Forensic Accounting Genre
Martin Hench is 67 years old at the start of the novel — significantly older than any previous Doctorow protagonist — and has spent his career as a forensic accountant specializing in Silicon Valley financial fraud. He finds the money when tech companies commit crimes, and he is very good at it. The choice of a late-career, financially comfortable protagonist with no particular ideological commitment is deliberate: Hench sees Silicon Valley clearly not because he is a radical outsider but because he has been inside it long enough to know where the bodies are buried.
The forensic accounting frame allows Doctorow to write about financial crime with the same technical specificity he brings to surveillance and security in the Little Brother books. Just as little-brother teaches readers how surveillance works by depicting someone evading it, Red Team Blues teaches how financial fraud works by depicting someone unraveling it. The pedagogy runs through the plot.
Cryptocurrency as Subject and Target
The specific financial crime at the novel's center involves cryptocurrency — specifically, a cryptographic key management scheme that turns out to conceal massive fraud. Doctorow's treatment of cryptocurrency is skeptical without being dismissive: the novel acknowledges that cryptographic technology is real and powerful while treating the financial applications built on top of it — the ICOs, the DeFi protocols, the NFT markets — as largely fraudulent or at minimum structured to obscure fraud.
This connects to Doctorow's broader analysis of platform-decay-cycle and enshittification: cryptocurrency platforms, the novel implies, follow the same pattern as other digital platforms, with the additional feature that their opacity makes fraud easier to commit and harder to detect. The novel was written and published during the period of high-profile cryptocurrency collapses (FTX, Terra/Luna), which gave its skeptical treatment additional context.
Silicon Valley as Setting and Subject
Red Team Blues is set in the specific physical and cultural geography of Silicon Valley — the houses in the hills, the venture capital offices, the restaurants where deals are made — in a way that Doctorow's more speculative fiction is not. This granular realism serves the argument: the novel depicts Silicon Valley not as a place of innovation but as a place of extraction, where the rhetoric of disruption conceals the same financial crimes that recur throughout American commercial history.
Hench's age is part of the argument. He has seen multiple generations of Silicon Valley hype — the dot-com boom, the social media era, the crypto wave — and recognizes them as variations on a pattern. Each wave generates genuine technical capability alongside enormous financial fraud; the fraud is enabled by the hype, which suppresses skepticism and due diligence. The forensic accountant as protagonist is the embodiment of the skeptical, technically sophisticated reader Doctorow wants to produce.
The Series Conception
Red Team Blues was conceived as the first book in a series covering Hench's career non-chronologically — the first novel depicts his final case before retirement, while subsequent volumes (the-bezzle and picks-and-shovels) go back in time to earlier cases in his career. This structure allows Doctorow to engage with different eras of Silicon Valley financial history while maintaining a consistent analytical perspective through a single protagonist.
The series represents a broadening of Doctorow's fiction toward mainstream genre thriller readership. The Little Brother books are explicitly pedagogical and tied to the young adult market; the Hench series aims at adult crime fiction readers while pursuing similar analytical goals.