Investigative Journalism

2019 · Patrick Radden Keefe · 464 pages · Nonfiction / History

Say Nothing opens with masked intruders taking a widowed mother of ten from her Belfast flat in 1972, and spends four decades and four hundred pages answering what happened to her and what happened to everyone who kept the secret. Patrick Radden Keefe braids the Jean McConville disappearance through the lives of IRA radicals, hunger strikes, peace deals, and a Boston College oral-history project that detonated decades later, producing the consensus masterpiece of Troubles nonfiction. It reads like a novel, argues like an indictment, and closes with a deduction that made headlines. The sprawling middle asks commitment. The ending repays it with interest.

2021 · Patrick Radden Keefe · 560 pages · Nonfiction / History

Empire of Pain traces three generations of the Sackler family, from the marketing genius who taught pharma how to sell to doctors, through the dynasty that built OxyContin and marketed it into an epidemic, to the museum-wing name-scrubbing endgame. Patrick Radden Keefe writes it as a family saga with the moral engine of a prosecution, meticulously documented and quietly furious, and readers consistently describe finishing it angrier than any thriller has ever made them. It's long, its final act cycles through legal maneuvering that mirrors reality's own exhausting repetition, and justice never arrives to provide catharsis. That's the point, and it lands.

2018 · John Carreyrou · 339 pages · Nonfiction

A gripping, meticulously reported investigation into the Theranos fraud that reads like a thriller, Bad Blood is investigative journalism at its finest and a cautionary tale about what happens when Silicon Valley's 'fake it till you make it' culture meets healthcare.