Thomas Pynchon brings us to New York in the early days of the internet 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 t be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there s shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what s left. Maxine Tarw 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 w 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 rmal 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 se 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, t 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? Hey. Who wants to kw?
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Penguin Audiobooks
ISBN-10
1611762332
ISBN-13
9781611762334
eBay Product ID (ePID)
189766121
Product Key Features
Author
Thomas Pynchon
Format
CD-Audio, CD Standard Audio Format
Language
English
Topic
Crime, Thriller & Adventure
Additional Product Features
Running Time
1110
Read by
Jeannie Berlin
Author Biography
THOMAS PYNCHON is the author of V. ; The Crying of Lot 49 ; Gravity s Rainbow ; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland ; Mason & Dixon ; Against the Day ; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity s Rainbow in 1974.