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 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 -ill 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?Hey. Who wants to
know?
