Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Rogues, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, as well as the critically-acclaimed books Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change on the origins of the Scorpions' power ballad, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.
Reads like a mashup of The Godfather and Chinatown, complete with gun battles, a ruthless kingpin and a mountain of cash. Except that it's all true. * Time * Essential reading. . . . A rich, beautifully told story, so suspenseful and with so many unexpected twists that in places it reads like a John le Carre novel. * Washington Post * A masterwork. . . . In this single tale about a global criminal, Keefe finds a story of quintessentially American hope. * Christian Science Monitor * Painstakingly reported and vividly told. . . . As immigration reform languishes in Washington . . . everyone involved--from policymakers to activists to the undocumented--would be wise to read The Snakehead. * Newsweek * A formidably well-researched book that is as much a paean to its author's industriousness as it is a chronicle of crime. -- Janet Maslin * New York Times *