Bleeding Edge

Bleeding Edge is a novel by the American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 2013. It is a detective story of a kind, and the two subjects running through it are the transformation of the world by the internet and New York in the months before the September 11 attacks.

Maxine Tarnow is a former certified fraud examiner who now works on her own, and the book opens on the first day of spring 2001 with her walking her sons to school. An acquaintance brings her a case: a computer-security firm run by Gabriel Ice, a man whose companies nobody can quite explain, has accounts that fail on the simplest checks.

Following the money takes her through the remains of the technology boom and the people who are still trying to get a share of it. There are large payments to a defunct website, connections to money-moving networks she does not understand at first, the attention of a government figure who would rather she stopped, and other people watching. Maxine keeps working the case while the city around her goes on being ordinary.