[2] The often surreal and dream-like plot of the novel opens on the first day of spring 2001, with Maxine Tarnow walking her two sons to school before going to work.

Maxine, a former certified fraud examiner, is approached by Reg Despard regarding suspicious goings-on at hashslingrz, a computer security firm run by Gabriel Ice.

She talks to an ex-temp for that site, learns they have strong Arab connections and move large sums of money through hawala, and notices she is being tailed afterwards.

Meanwhile, mysterious government heavyweight Nicholas Windust puts pressure on Maxine, asking her to pump her Israeli brother-in-law for information regarding Mossad hacking methods.

With the help of Conkling Speedwell, a man with a superhuman forensic sense of smell, she learns there is a peculiar mystery scent at the scene of Lester's death.

Maxine receives a videotape of men apparently rehearsing on the Deseret rooftop the shooting down of a jet plane using a Stinger missile.

But he and his business partner had watched Monday Night Football and fallen asleep, and the morning of 9/11 had joined the masses seeking refuge in New Jersey and was unable to get through.

"[2] David Morris Kipen wrote for Publishers Weekly, "It's a peculiarity of musical notation that major works are, more often than not, set in a minor key, and vice versa.

Bleeding Edge is mellow, plummy, minor-key Pynchon, his second such in a row since Against the Day (2006)... but in its world-historical savvy, its supple feel for the joys and stings of love — both married and parental — this new book is anything but minor.

On the contrary, Bleeding Edge is a chamber symphony in P major, so generous of invention it sometimes sprawls, yet so sharp it ultimately pierces.

"[6] Critic Michiko Kakutani, reviewing Bleeding Edge for The New York Times, called it "Pynchon Lite," and "a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details.