Martin Hench Books in Order

The Martin Hench books take Cory Doctorow’s long standing interest in finance, technology, and accountability and wrap it in the voice of a working forensic accountant. Instead of hackers breaking into systems, these novels follow someone who reads spreadsheets and shell companies the way other detectives read crime scenes.

Martin, or Marty to his friends, spends his life on the boundary between the people who want to hide money and the people determined to find it. He is not a cop, not quite a private eye, and definitely not a saint. He is a contractor who gets paid to track cash through layered deals and paper walls, and who tries, within the limits of his own compromises, to push back when the powerful get away with too much.

Red Team Blues introduces him late in life, in his sixties, living comfortably in a tour bus turned mobile home and picking his jobs carefully. A favor for an old friend drags him into the murky world of cryptocurrency and secure enclave hardware, where a stolen laptop holding critical cryptographic keys could crash fortunes and destroy evidence of who owns what. Marty’s skill at following money trails suddenly makes him a liability to very dangerous people.

The Bezzle jumps back to 2006, when Marty is in his professional prime and living part time on Catalina Island. A chance encounter pulls him into a sprawling scheme that treats the California prison system as an investment vehicle, with private equity investors happily extracting fees from the poorest families in the state. The more Marty pulls on the thread, the clearer it becomes that simple exposure is not enough when everyone along the chain is getting rich.

Picks and Shovels goes back further still, to 1980s San Francisco, showing how a young Marty falls in love with both computers and double entry bookkeeping. Hired by a religious computer company with a very captive customer base, he eventually sides with three former employees who have started a rival firm meant to break those lock ins. It is part coming of age story, part history of the personal computer revolution, and part primer on how vendor lock in turns into outright fraud.

Taken together, the Martin Hench novels sketch the arc of late twentieth and early twenty first century capitalism from an unusual angle. Instead of boardrooms and trading floors, we see back offices, call centers, jails, and the bland conference rooms where contracts are signed. Doctorow uses Marty’s wry, sometimes weary perspective to translate complex financial engineering into human terms.

The tone is that of a crime series that understands balance sheets. There are chases and threats, but the real tension often lies in whether Marty can find leverage against people who have built entire systems to avoid consequences. For readers who enjoy Doctorow’s essays on monopoly power and chokepoint capitalism, these novels provide a fictional counterpart where every ledger entry is a clue.