Reading List

Authors Like David Enrich

In 2019 the Supreme Court declined to hear an obscure case, and Justice Clarence Thomas used the occasion to suggest that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan — the 1964 decision that requires a public figure to prove actual malice to win a libel case, and that made modern American investigative reporting possible — ought to be reconsidered. Murder the Truth (Mariner, 11 March 2025, 323 pages) is Enrich's account of the campaign behind that suggestion: the lawyers, the funders, the law review article almost nobody read, the suits against Gawker and Rolling Stone, and the local reporters who won their cases and were ruined by the legal bills anyway. It became a New York Times bestseller. He is business investigations editor at the Times, and it is his fourth book. The Spider Network (2017) is the rigging of Libor; Dark Towers (2020), a number one bestseller, is Deutsche Bank's long decline and the executive whose death sits at the centre of it; Servants of the Damned (2022) is the law firm Jones Day and the work large firms do for clients other firms will not touch. The through line is the machinery that lets power avoid being questioned. The ten below follow it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Investigative non-fiction · Banks, law firms, the press · Four books · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love David Enrich, the closest match is Christopher Leonard: one company, reconstructed over years from documents and former employees. Jane Mayer traces the money behind institutions and Patrick Radden Keefe the families and lawyers who protect it. For Murder the Truth specifically, read Anthony Lewis's Make No Law, the classic account of the Sullivan case, and Samantha Barbas for the scholarly history. Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy is the Gawker story told from the side that paid for the lawsuit, which is why it belongs here.

Every book by David Enrich →

10 authors like David Enrich

01
One institution, followed for years · Closest match

Christopher Leonard

American · The Meat Racket (2014), Kochland (2019), The Lords of Easy Money (2022)

Kochland runs to around seven hundred pages on Koch Industries — the trading floors, the refineries, the safety failures, the political operation — built over six years from interviews with former employees. The Meat Racket does the same for Tyson Foods and the contract farmers who raise its chickens. The Lords of Easy Money turns to the Federal Reserve through Thomas Hoenig, the official who kept voting against quantitative easing, and what the policy did to the shape of the economy.

The nearest match in method and the obvious next book. Both writers take a single institution that would prefer not to be written about, work outward from people who used to be inside it, and refuse to accept the official account of anything. Leonard has done it three times, which is a rarer discipline than it sounds. Read Kochland after Dark Towers and the two fit together like halves of the same argument about how large private organisations actually behave.

— Lisanne

Every book by Christopher Leonard →

02
The money behind the institutions

Jane Mayer

American · The Dark Side (2008), Dark Money (2016)

Dark Money traces how a small number of extremely wealthy American families spent four decades building foundations, think tanks, legal centres and academic programmes to shift public opinion and policy, largely out of public view. The Dark Side reported the legal architecture assembled around torture after 2001. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995 and previously covered the White House for The Wall Street Journal.

The book Murder the Truth is standing on. Mayer established the shape of the story Enrich tells: an unpopular legal position, funded patiently for decades by people who can afford to lose for a long time, arriving eventually at the Supreme Court looking like common sense. She is the more formidable reporter; he is the more readable writer. Read Dark Money if the funding structures in Murder the Truth were what you wanted more of.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jane Mayer →

03
The family and the lawyers

Patrick Radden Keefe

American · Say Nothing (2018), Empire of Pain (2021), Rogues (2022)

Empire of Pain is three generations of the Sackler family, the marketing of OxyContin and the legal strategy that kept the family name off the settlements for as long as it did; it won the Baillie Gifford Prize. Say Nothing reconstructs the Troubles through one abduction in Belfast in 1972 and became an FX series in 2024. Rogues collects a dozen of his magazine pieces on arms dealers, forgers and financial criminals.

The same subject as Servants of the Damned, approached through a family rather than a firm. Keefe is unusually good on the professional machinery around wealth — the lawyers, the public relations advisers, the philanthropic laundering — which is Enrich's territory exactly. He also received legal threats over Empire of Pain, which puts him inside the story Murder the Truth tells rather than merely adjacent to it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Patrick Radden Keefe →

Authors like Patrick Radden Keefe →

04
The most readable version

Michael Lewis

American · Liar's Poker (1989), The Big Short (2010), The Premonition (2021)

Lewis writes complicated systems through the few individuals who understood them first: the investors who saw the mortgage market failing, the public health officials whose pandemic plans went unused, the civil servants managing catastrophic risks nobody thanks them for. The Big Short became a 2015 film. He has been criticised, particularly over Going Infinite, for building narratives around charismatic subjects who turn out to be less admirable than they appear on the page.

The writer who made this genre commercial, and the useful contrast. Lewis and Enrich cover the same financial world, but Lewis works through access to a small number of vivid people, where Enrich works through documents and former employees who no longer have a reason to protect anyone. That difference is why Dark Towers is harder going and more durable. Read The Big Short for the pleasure and Enrich for the record.

— Lisanne

Every book by Michael Lewis →

Authors like Michael Lewis →

05
The corporate collapse, from inside the numbers

Bethany McLean

American · The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003), All the Devils Are Here (2010)

McLean was the Fortune reporter who asked in print in 2001 how exactly Enron made its money, months before the company failed, and then wrote the definitive account of it with Peter Elkind; a documentary followed in 2005. All the Devils Are Here, written with Joe Nocera, is the financial crisis, and The Big Fail (2023) examines the pandemic response through the same lens of corporate incentives.

The closest match for what Enrich does with banks. Both came out of financial journalism, both are comfortable reading the filings themselves, and both build the narrative around the moment an institution's own people stopped believing its story. McLean is the better analyst of a balance sheet; Enrich is the better narrator of a career. Read The Smartest Guys in the Room before or after The Spider Network.

— Lisanne

Every book by Bethany McLean →

06
Older than the genre · The Sullivan case itself

Anthony Lewis

American · Gideon's Trumpet (1964), Make No Law (1991)

Make No Law is the standard account of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan: a civil rights advertisement with small factual errors, a Montgomery city commissioner, a half-million-dollar judgment intended to bankrupt northern newspapers covering the segregated South, and the Supreme Court decision that resulted. Gideon's Trumpet did the same for the right to counsel. Lewis covered the Court for The New York Times for decades and won two Pulitzer Prizes. He died in 2013.

The book Murder the Truth assumes you have read, and the one to read first if you have not. Lewis explains what Sullivan actually decided and why it was needed, in the context of segregationist officials using libel law to stop reporting on the civil rights movement — which is the history that makes Enrich's subject urgent rather than technical. Together they are sixty years of the same fight from both ends.

— Lisanne
07
The scholarly version

Samantha Barbas

American · Actual Malice (2023), Newsworthy (2017)

Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan returns to the case with the archives and the legal record, restoring the civil rights context that later accounts often flatten into a press-freedom parable. Barbas is a law professor and legal historian who has written several books on privacy, publicity and the American media, including on the case that shaped the modern right to privacy.

The academic counterpart to Enrich's reporting, and reviewers have repeatedly recommended reading them together. Where Enrich is tracking a live campaign against the precedent, Barbas establishes what the precedent was actually for and who it was protecting. If you finished Murder the Truth uncertain how strong the legal ground really is, this is the book that answers it without a thesis to sell you.

— Lisanne
08
The press, investigated from Britain

Nick Davies

British · Flat Earth News (2008), Hack Attack (2014)

Davies spent decades at The Guardian and broke the story that journalists working for the News of the World had accessed the voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, which led to the paper closing in 2011 and to a public inquiry into the British press. Hack Attack is his account of that investigation, including the years when almost nobody would print it and the legal pressure applied to stop him.

The other half of the press-freedom argument, from a country with far weaker protections. Britain's libel standards are one of the reasons Enrich's subject matters — wealthy claimants have long chosen London courts precisely because it is easier to win there — and Davies shows both what an unaccountable press does with its freedom and what it costs to hold one to account. Uncomfortable in both directions, which is the point.

— Lisanne
Every book by Nick Davies →
09
The institution captured by money

Joshua Hunt

American · University of Nike (2018)

Hunt went to Oregon on a freelance assignment about a university's handling of a sexual assault allegation, could not work out why the records were so thoroughly buried, and stayed four years. The book that resulted traces how the University of Oregon, gutted by a 1990 ballot measure that slashed state funding for public education, came to depend on Nike and its co-founder Phil Knight, who has given the school more than half a billion dollars. The university disputes the framing and says the giving came without conditions.

The same argument as Servants of the Damned, applied to a public institution rather than a law firm: an organisation with a duty to the public becomes dependent on private money and slowly reorganises around it, without anyone signing anything improper. Hunt has written one book to Enrich's four and worked without a newspaper behind him, which makes the reporting more impressive rather than less.

— Lisanne

Every book by Joshua Hunt →

Authors like Joshua Hunt →

10
The argument against him

Ryan Holiday

American · Trust Me, I'm Lying (2012), Conspiracy (2018)

Conspiracy tells the Gawker story from the other side: Peter Thiel's secret, years-long funding of legal actions against the site, culminating in Hulk Hogan's successful invasion of privacy suit and Gawker's bankruptcy in 2016. Holiday had extraordinary access to Thiel and to Gawker's founder. His earlier book Trust Me, I'm Lying is a first-person account of manipulating blogs and news cycles as a marketing executive, which is worth knowing when you read him on the media.

The case Enrich treats as a warning, told by someone who finds it admirable. Murder the Truth uses the Gawker litigation as a template for how a billionaire can destroy a publication through the courts; Conspiracy presents it as patient, brilliant strategy against an outlet that had genuinely wronged people. Both accounts are well reported and they cannot both be the right frame. Read them back to back and decide, which is more useful than being told.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved David Enrich

If you want the closest match, read Christopher Leonard.

Kochland. One private company, six years of reporting, seven hundred pages.

If you loved Murder the Truth, read Anthony Lewis first.

Make No Law. What the Sullivan case actually decided, and who it protected.

If you want the money behind it, read Jane Mayer.

Dark Money. Forty years of patient funding, mostly out of sight.

If you loved Dark Towers, read Bethany McLean.

The Smartest Guys in the Room. Enron, by the reporter who asked first.

If you want the opposite frame, read Ryan Holiday.

Conspiracy. The Gawker case, told by the side that funded it.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like David Enrich

Who should I read if I love David Enrich?

Christopher Leonard is the closest — the same patient reconstruction of one institution from documents and former employees. Jane Mayer covers the money behind institutions and Patrick Radden Keefe the families and lawyers protecting it. Bethany McLean is the match for the banking books and Michael Lewis the most readable neighbour. For Murder the Truth, Anthony Lewis wrote the classic account of the Sullivan case and Samantha Barbas the scholarly history; Nick Davies covers press accountability from Britain. Joshua Hunt applies the same argument to a public university, and Ryan Holiday tells the Gawker story from the opposite side.

What is Murder the Truth about?

The campaign to overturn New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision requiring public figures to prove actual malice to win a libel case. Enrich traces it from a 2019 opinion in which Justice Clarence Thomas raised the prospect, back through the lawyers, funders and legal scholarship behind it, and forward into cases against Gawker and Rolling Stone and into local newsrooms where reporters won their suits and were financially ruined anyway. Published by Mariner on 11 March 2025, it became a New York Times bestseller.

Which David Enrich book should I start with?

Dark Towers (2020) if you want the one that made his name: Deutsche Bank's decades of misconduct and decline, and the executive at the centre of it. Murder the Truth (2025) if you want the most consequential and the most current. Servants of the Damned (2022), on the law firm Jones Day, is the best of the three if what interests you is how professional services enable everything else. The Spider Network (2017), on the rigging of Libor, is the most technical.

Is David Enrich writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. He has published four books since 2017 and remains business investigations editor at The New York Times, so the pattern suggests another will come, but there is no title, publisher or date in circulation. Murder the Truth is the most recent, from March 2025.

What is New York Times v. Sullivan and why does it matter?

A 1964 Supreme Court decision arising from a civil rights advertisement in The New York Times that contained minor factual errors. A Montgomery, Alabama, city commissioner won a large libel judgment over it, part of a wider effort by southern officials to use libel law to stop northern papers reporting on segregation. The Supreme Court overturned the judgment and held that a public official must prove actual malice — knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Without it, reporting aggressively on powerful people in the United States would be far riskier.

Do I need to read Murder the Truth if I am not American?

The legal specifics are American, but the mechanism is not. The book is about how expensive, drawn-out litigation silences criticism regardless of whether the claimant eventually wins, which is why claimants from many countries have historically preferred to sue in London. If you want the European side of that story, Nick Davies is the reporter to read. Enrich is explicit that the tactic travels well.

What did David Enrich do before writing books?

Newspaper reporting on finance. He covered banking for The Wall Street Journal, including from London, before joining The New York Times, where he became finance editor and then business investigations editor. He studied at Claremont McKenna College. That background shows in the books: he reads the filings and the court documents himself, and the narratives are built out of what can be evidenced rather than what a source remembers.

What order should I read his books in?

Any order — they share no characters and each takes a different institution. By publication: The Spider Network (2017), Dark Towers (2020), Servants of the Damned (2022), Murder the Truth (2025). Thematically they build, from a trading scandal to a bank to the law firm that serves such clients to the legal campaign that would make reporting on all of it harder, so publication order also happens to be the best route.

Sources

List last reviewed 9 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“It has huge implications for our democracy.”

— David Enrich, on the campaign against NYT v. Sullivan, Democracy Now!

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