Several of the chapters in “Rogues” are about corporate crooks, traders and bankers and mining moguls - Keefe has a gift for clearly explaining deliberately arcane financial transactions. His interviews with her family and with Bishop herself go far beyond the usual mass-shooter headlines. Keefe finds that when she was 21, Bishop had shot her brother to death in what was deemed an accident - a judgment that might have been tragically wrong.

In “A Loaded Gun,” Keefe looks into the case of Amy Bishop, a neurobiology professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who in 2010 came to a faculty meeting and shot six of her colleagues, three of them fatally.

The story expands to retell the legal battles that followed and to offer a fascinating glimpse inside the world of wine counterfeiting. The appearance of his byline in the New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.Some of the stories would make entertaining caper movies, like the first, “The Jefferson Bottles.” It recounts how a wealthy wine dealer with a sketchy past, Hardy Rodenstock, scammed a much wealthier wine collector - Bill Koch, one of the billionaire Koch brothers - out of large amounts of money with some dusty old bottles of French wine that allegedly had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black-market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death-penalty attorney who represents the 'worst of the worst', among other bravura works of literary journalism. As Keefe says in his preface: 'They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker. Patrick Radden Keefe's work has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US to the Orwell Prize in the UK for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Every time he writes an article, I read it. Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

Rogues by Patrick Radden Keefe