When I hear Patrick Radden Keefe has a new book, my click-mind perks up. As Rachel Maddow says: “I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read it. Every time he writes an article, I read it. . . . He’s a national treasure.”

Keefe’s last book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for the best non-fiction book in the English language; and his book before that, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, was hailed by the Sunday Times as “an unrelenting epic work.”