A myriad of characters, a new one introduced almost every chapter? Check Random events that seem to have no relevance to the main story? Check A dense and heavy style? Check Sudden outbursts of song lyrics on the page? Yes check. This is absolutely a Thomas Pynchon novel through and through. A writer who is a mysterious as the plots of his books. Having avoided the limelight all his life not much is known about this prolific American author apart from his books being notoriously hard to follow and understand. While I have not attempted the infamous Gravity's Rainbow, I have The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice and now Bleeding Edge under my belt. An achievement I take pride in, be warned, if you are new to Pynchon it is not easy going. The man shuns writing convention as if it were the plague but, give it some time and persistence his novels are immensely rewarding to read. Bleeding Edge is Pynchon's newest book and probably his most accessible. So perhaps a good one to start if your looking to crack into the mysterious world of the Pynchonite cult. It follows Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator living in New York City. Her normal life of pursuing petty criminals is abruptly put to a halt when she is put onto the case of a billionaire CEO of a computer securities company who have some, shall we say...discrepancies in their books. This launches her into the world of the cyberpunk, attending hacker conventions and bars for code-monkeys. She encounters a roster of characters just as bizarre as one would expect from the man himself. A detective who works off smell alone, a geek chic who is obsessed with Rachel from Friends, a hacker who is so paranoid he will only have discussions in the "deep web" far below the surface of what you or I will ever see when using Google. Pynchon's knowledge of the ins and outs of computer workings and hacking is staggering, I myself being one of those people who considers himself "good with computers" had absolutely no idea what he was talking about most of the time. Seeing as this man was born around the same time as my grandparents and they have difficulty opening emails that's pretty impressive. Set in 2001, you would have had to been living under a very large rock for some amount of time to not know what is coming. The presence of 9/11 is inescapable throughout the book. Hints here and there, that the characters are oblivious too sew the seeds of dread and foreboding expertly. When the event finally happens in the last 100 pages or so, it hit me like a train, Pynchon's style begs empathy for the characters caught up in something they have no hope of understanding. An excellent book that with any Pynchon, one does not simply enjoy reading, but rather experiences a master at work.