Cory Doctorow’s new mystery/thriller, The Bezzle, is genre-mashing, instructive, infuriating, and compulsively readable. It’s also one of his best books.

A prequel to last year’s Red Team Blues, The Bezzle features forensic accountant Martin Hench. This is a hero who battles evil with his brains, taking on the prison-tech complex, a beyond-sleazy financial manipulator, and the irredeemably corrupt Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

I won’t reveal too much of the plot. After a relatively calm (well, watch out for bison) visit to Catalina island off the coast from Los Angeles, Hench is drawn into, first, exposing a local pyramid scheme and then much broader scam. The latter, under our current financial laws, is essential legal even though it has countless more victims. In this story, the main victims are maltreated prisoners and their families, who become nothing but cash machines for sociopathic corporate bosses. LA County Sheriff’s deputies are partners in the crimes.

Hench infuses his story with a message, not solely holding our attention with the action. His commentary on how the world works is trenchant, and will anger anyone with an ounce of social conscience. You may find yourself saying, “This can’t really be happening,” but this book lays out some of the most vile realities our our society and economy. Not least are the ways lawmakers and judges have given the ultra-wealthy and their enablers permission to steal from the rest of us — and poison the lives of the people who have the least power — and do it with impunity.

The good guys have their own ethical dilemmas along the way, and some of their decisions are discomfiting. How does someone value an individual, and a friendship, compared to countless thousands of people who have no power whatever but who desperately need an ally?

The Bezzle is one of Cory’s most notable books. I put it in a category with Little Brother, Walkaway, and Radicalized.  Each of them was brilliant in its own way, and each transcended the genre it occupied. Cory (a long-time friend) has always examined the core issues of our tech-infused society through his fiction. But those books’ messages are especially powerful, the kind we have to spread widely though our society, or fall to the resurgent fascism — a terrifying collusion of extremism, tech, financial manipulation, racism, and more — that might well be in our immediate future.