Plain tales of crookedness and corruption: Rogues reviewed

Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel, a ‘best of’ articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for the New Yorker. The magazine has always had its stars, among them James Thurber, E.B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Malcolm, Anthony Lane and Malcolm Gladwell. Let’s be honest, Patrick Radden Keefe is not one of them – or wasn’t, until the publication last year of Empire of Pain, his book about the Sackler family and America’s opioid epidemic, based on an old New Yorker article. An overnight sensation, it was years in the making.

In fact if you’ve read the New Yorker over the past decade or so – if you’re a rootless cosmopolitan, say, or a non-Manhattan-dweller of vaguely liberal inclinations who can nonetheless afford both private medical insurance and Condé Nast’s subscription rates – you’ll have come across Keefe’s features.