The latest addition to my website is Thomas Pynchon‘s Bleeding Edge. This novel continues with Pynchon’s obsession with conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies. It is set at the turn of the millennium, so includes conspiracies about 9/11 and, as you can imagine, it is not Al-Qaida who gets the blame. It tells the story of Maxine Tarnow, formerly Loeffler, a fraud investigator, who finds herself investigating, at every turn, a company called hashslingrz, run by the sinister Gabriel Ice, which seems to have a finger in every pie, from deep web-based virtual world games to the dirty deeds of the US government, by way of mysterious Arabs, Mossad and an attempt to control the world server market. It is great fun, not least because Pynchon, as always, keeps the story going at a frenetic pace and throws in wisecracks galore and his usual language games, as well as characters who are, well, characters.