Bleeding Edge is a mystery story with an unlikely investigator, Maxine Tarnow. She runs a small fraud-investigation agency in New York City called "Tail `Em and Nail `Em." Her specialty is to find hidden illegal fund diversions below the surface of apparently legitimate businesses. In addition to her regular cases, Maxine is approached by Reg Despard a documentary film producer who travels around NYC creating interesting cassettes that he sells on the street. Reg tells Maxi he has gained some mysterious attention with his latest production that he is told is far ahead of the leading edge of the post-modern art forms he sells.
It seems Reg has crossed paths with a computer-security firm downtown called "hashlingerz" run by CEO Gabriel Ice a boy billionaire who walked away rich and unscathed from the dotcom implosion in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Maxi is used to going below the surface of businesses in her investigations of fraud using computer spread sheets. But, she does not know how deep fraud can be until she gets mixed up with the Internet prophet Gabriel Ice. He has power like the U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in his policing of the characters that hang out in the bleeding edge of cyberspace. This is a strange gray area (like outer territories on map programs) that gamers and other computer geeks enter and use to drop clandestine links like sign posts for fellow players. Maxi explores hashlingerz to see if Ice's intentions are good, bad, or beyond moral positioning.
Maxine is not as pure as the driven snow even though she is a responsible woman who takes good care of her children, has good friends, and allows visits to her apartment and emotional connections with her family and ex-husband, Horst. Investigating fraud requires the use of some techniques that are not only legally questionable but actually are over the edge of the law. Caught and burned in the past, Maxi has lost her Certified Fraud Examiner's license. A moral individual in her social life, she must break the rules sometimes during her work on cases.
The novel follows Maxine Tarnow as she looks into Gabriel Ice's operations meeting many quirky denizens of the bleeding edge of the Internet. Carrying a small caliber handgun, Maxi is well aware of the dangers she and her family are exposed to when she moves around NYC and gathers information from human and electronic sources.
I was reading along one day on my iPad using my Kindle program when Maxi was randomly clicking on visible pixels in the gray display of the bleeding edge looking for clues. After changing her dimensional view of her screen to reveal links, she clicked on a minute star-like image. I felt a mental click that took me to a section of Pynchon's earlier novel, Against the Day. Suddenly, I was in one of the vector fields embedded in that novel - a connection between the content of two novels in my mind as unconscious as the release of repressed memories. Gabriel Ice's hashlingerz technology could gain control of an unlimited number of vectors (characters) in more than one area of the bleeding edge (novels) at a level unknown to most readers via calculus (software) predictions based on surreptitious observations. Talk about the invasion of personal space and mind control by government and linked private agencies, Mr. Pynchon shows us there are no moral edges for the real but unknown leaders of the social world embedded in cyberspace. Conspiracy theories (JFK, 911, NYSE, ICE) take on whole new meanings in Bleeding Edge (and Against the Day). I give this new novel my highest recommendation to readers.
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