Reading List

Authors Like Patrick Radden Keefe

Q: Who should I read if I love Patrick Radden Keefe?

David Grann and Lawrence Wright, his colleagues at The New Yorker, are the closest in method: one crime investigated until the system behind it is visible. For Say Nothing, read Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA and Anna Burns's novel Milkman. For Empire of Pain, read Beth Macy's Dopesick and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood. Ronan Farrow, Robert Kolker, Jon Krakauer and Ben Macintyre complete the list.

Q: What books are like Say Nothing?

Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA (2002) and Voices from the Grave (2010), which draws on the same Boston College interviews; Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a novel set in Belfast during the Troubles; and, for the same structure in another setting, Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) and David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon (2017).

Q: What books are like Empire of Pain?

Beth Macy's Dopesick (2018) covers the opioid crisis from the communities it hit. John Carreyrou's Bad Blood (2018) and Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill (2019) are about companies and powerful people using lawyers and investigators to keep a story quiet.

Q: What prizes has Patrick Radden Keefe won?

Say Nothing won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and the 2019 Orwell Prize for political writing. Empire of Pain won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He also won a National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2014.

Say Nothing began with an obituary. In 2013 Patrick Radden Keefe read that Dolours Price, a former IRA volunteer, had died, and followed the thread back to Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten taken from her Belfast flat in December 1972 and never seen alive again. He went to Northern Ireland seven times over four years and interviewed more than a hundred people; the book came out in 2018, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize for political writing, and became an FX series in 2024. Empire of Pain (2021), his history of the Sackler family and OxyContin, won the Baillie Gifford Prize, and in April 2026 London Falling followed the death of Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old who went into the Thames from a riverside flat in 2019. Readers come to Keefe for the same things each time: a single crime opened up until a whole system is visible behind it, years of interviews, a novelist's control of structure, and no comfort at the end. The writers below share that work — patient reporting on violence, money and the people who cover it up — or, in two cases, his ground in Northern Ireland.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Investigative journalism · True crime · The Troubles · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Patrick Radden Keefe, read Ed Moloney for the IRA history behind Say Nothing and Anna Burns for the same Belfast as a novel. After Empire of Pain, go to Beth Macy, who followed OxyContin into the towns it hit. For one crime that opens onto a whole system, David Grann and Lawrence Wright are the closest in method — and below are five more, with a place to start for each.

10 authors like Patrick Radden Keefe

The IRA history behind Say Nothing

Ed Moloney

Irish · Reporter

Moloney was Northern Editor of The Irish Times from 1980 to 1985 and later of the Sunday Tribune, and was named Irish Journalist of the Year in 1999. A Secret History of the IRA (2002) traces the leadership's path from armed struggle to the peace process. He directed Boston College's Belfast Project, which recorded former republican and loyalist paramilitaries on condition that the tapes stay sealed until their deaths; Voices from the Grave (2010) was built from two of them, Brendan Hughes and David Ervine. From 2011 the Police Service of Northern Ireland, backed by the US Justice Department, went to court to obtain the interviews. He died in New York in October 2025.

The source behind the source. The Belfast Project tapes and the legal fight over them are the spine of Say Nothing, and Moloney is the man who made them. His books are denser and more argumentative than Keefe's, and less interested in narrative, but they give you the organisation that Keefe's characters were inside.

— Lisanne

The same Belfast, as a novel

Anna Burns

Northern Irish · b. 1962 · Novelist · Booker 2018

Burns was born in Belfast in 1962. Milkman follows an unnamed eighteen-year-old girl in an unnamed city who is pursued by a married paramilitary known as “the milkman”; it won the Booker Prize in 2018, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award. In June 2019 it won the Orwell Prize for political fiction on the same night Say Nothing won the prize for political writing.

The fiction to read after Say Nothing. Keefe shows the Troubles from the inside of the IRA; Burns shows what the same years did to everyone around it — the rumour, the surveillance and the silence that the title of Keefe's book is about. It is a demanding, very funny novel, and the best account of that kind of silence in literature.

— Lisanne

The other side of Empire of Pain

Beth Macy

American · b. 1964 · Reporter

Macy reported for The Roanoke Times in Virginia for twenty-five years. Dopesick (2018) follows OxyContin from Purdue Pharma's sales force into the towns of Appalachia, and was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal; she co-wrote and executive-produced the Hulu series made from it. Raising Lazarus (2022) is about the people trying to repair the damage.

Keefe tells the opioid story from the boardroom and the family dynasty; Macy tells it from the pharmacies, emergency rooms and kitchen tables at the other end. The two books were written in parallel and fit together exactly. Macy is less elegant, angrier and closer to the people she writes about.

— Lisanne

Every book by Beth Macy →

One crime, a whole system

David Grann

American · b. 1967 · Reporter

Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), about the murders of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma and the early FBI, was a National Book Award finalist and won the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. The Wager (2023) reconstructs an eighteenth-century British shipwreck and the conflicting accounts the survivors gave of it.

The nearest writer to Keefe in method, and his colleague at the same magazine. Both start with a single murder and keep digging until the institutions behind it are in view, and both save a turn of the investigation for late in the book. Killers of the Flower Moon is the obvious next read after Say Nothing.

— Lisanne

Every book by David Grann →

Belief, violence and the long investigation

Lawrence Wright

American · b. 1947 · Reporter · Pulitzer 2007

Wright has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. The Looming Tower (2006), on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) was a National Book Award finalist and became Alex Gibney's documentary.

Wright shares Keefe's patience with people who commit violence for a cause, and his refusal to make them simple. The Looming Tower does for al-Qaeda what Say Nothing does for the IRA: it follows a handful of believers over decades and shows how an organisation turns conviction into killing.

— Lisanne

Every book by Lawrence Wright →

The corporate cover-up, reported live

John Carreyrou

French-American · Reporter

Carreyrou spent twenty years at The Wall Street Journal, where he shared in two Pulitzer Prizes won by the paper's teams, in 2003 and 2015. His 2015 reporting exposed the blood-testing company Theranos, and Bad Blood (2018), the book of that investigation, won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. He joined The New York Times in 2023.

The book to read for the side of Empire of Pain that is about lawyers, money and reputation. Carreyrou shows a company using lawyers, threats and private investigators to keep the truth out of print, and tells it with the same thriller pacing Keefe brings to the Sacklers.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Carreyrou →

Institutions that protect their own

Ronan Farrow

American · b. 1987 · Reporter

Farrow's New Yorker reporting on Harvey Weinstein won the magazine the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, shared with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times. Catch and Kill (2019) tells how NBC News declined to air his findings and how private investigators, including operatives of the Israeli firm Black Cube, worked to stop the story. In 2020 the Times media columnist Ben Smith questioned parts of his reporting; Farrow said he stood by it.

Another New Yorker investigation about powerful people and the systems that kept them safe, told this time with the reporter inside the story. Farrow is more personal and more breathless than Keefe, but readers who liked the cover-up half of Empire of Pain will find the same machinery at work.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ronan Farrow →

A family carrying a larger story

Robert Kolker

American · Reporter

Kolker is an American journalist from Baltimore who made his name in magazine investigations. Lost Girls (2013) is about five young women, all sex workers, killed by the Long Island serial killer, and was one of Publishers Weekly's top ten books of its year. Hidden Valley Road (2020), about a family in which six of twelve children were diagnosed with schizophrenia, was an Oprah's Book Club pick and one of The New York Times' ten best books of 2020.

Kolker shares Keefe's interest in the families left behind. Lost Girls is about victims the police barely looked for, as the McConville children were ignored for decades, and Hidden Valley Road is a family saga as carefully built as the Sackler chapters of Empire of Pain.

— Lisanne

Every book by Robert Kolker →

Faith, murder and the closed world

Jon Krakauer

American · b. 1954 · Journalist

Krakauer made his name with Into the Wild (1996) and Into Thin Air (1997), his account of the 1996 Everest disaster, in which he was a participant. Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) investigates the July 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter Erica by her brothers-in-law Ron and Dan Lafferty, fundamentalist Mormons, and the history of the faith behind them.

Under the Banner of Heaven is the book on this list closest in shape to Say Nothing: a single killing in a tight community, set against the history of the movement that made the killers believe they were right. Krakauer is blunter and more opinionated than Keefe, but the structure is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jon Krakauer →

Betrayal and the double life

Ben Macintyre

British · b. 1963 · Historian

Macintyre is a columnist for The Times and writes histories of espionage. A Spy Among Friends (2014) follows Kim Philby's betrayal of British intelligence through his friendship with the MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott; Operation Mincemeat (2010) tells how British intelligence floated a corpse carrying false invasion plans off Spain in 1943; The Spy and the Traitor, about the KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

For readers who were gripped by the informers in Say Nothing and the question of who was working for whom. Macintyre writes about trust, loyalty and double lives with the same pace Keefe brings to Rogues, and he is the easiest writer on this list to read for pure narrative pleasure.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ben Macintyre →

Where to start if you loved Patrick Radden Keefe

If you want Say Nothing again, read Anna Burns.

Milkman: the same city and the same silence, as a novel.

If you want the history underneath it, read Ed Moloney.

A Secret History of the IRA, then Voices from the Grave.

If you want Empire of Pain from the ground, read Beth Macy.

Dopesick: OxyContin in the towns where it was sold.

If you want the same method on another crime, read David Grann.

Killers of the Flower Moon: one murder, and then a whole system.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Patrick Radden Keefe

Who should I read if I love Patrick Radden Keefe?

David Grann and Lawrence Wright, his colleagues at The New Yorker, are the closest in method: one crime investigated until the system behind it is visible. For Say Nothing, read Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA and Anna Burns's novel Milkman. For Empire of Pain, read Beth Macy's Dopesick and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood. Ronan Farrow, Robert Kolker, Jon Krakauer and Ben Macintyre complete the list.

What books are like Say Nothing?

Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA (2002) and Voices from the Grave (2010), which draws on the same Boston College interviews; Anna Burns's Milkman (2018), a novel set in Belfast during the Troubles; and, for the same structure in another setting, Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) and David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon (2017).

What books are like Empire of Pain?

Beth Macy's Dopesick (2018) covers the opioid crisis from the communities it hit. John Carreyrou's Bad Blood (2018) and Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill (2019) are about companies and powerful people using lawyers and investigators to keep a story quiet.

What is London Falling about?

Keefe's book published in April 2026 investigates the death of Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old who fell from a riverside flat into the Thames in London in 2019, and his parents' search for what happened. It also portrays the London underworld of criminals and dubious businessmen around the case. A24 has acquired the television rights.

Is Say Nothing a true story?

Yes. It is nonfiction about the abduction and murder of Jean McConville in Belfast in December 1972 and the IRA members connected to it, including Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes. Keefe drew on more than a hundred interviews and on the Boston College oral history archive. Gerry Adams, whom the book discusses at length, has always denied IRA membership and any involvement in McConville's death. The FX series adapted from the book was released in 2024.

What prizes has Patrick Radden Keefe won?

Say Nothing won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and the 2019 Orwell Prize for political writing. Empire of Pain won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He also won a National Magazine Award for feature writing in 2014.

Footnotes

List last reviewed 15 October 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.

Authors Like Patrick Radden Keefe

10 authors like Patrick Radden Keefe

Ed Moloney

Anna Burns

Beth Macy

David Grann

Lawrence Wright

John Carreyrou

Ronan Farrow

Robert Kolker

Jon Krakauer

Ben Macintyre

Where to start if you loved Patrick Radden Keefe

Frequently asked questions about authors like Patrick Radden Keefe

Who should I read if I love Patrick Radden Keefe?

What books are like Say Nothing?

What books are like Empire of Pain?

What is London Falling about?

Is Say Nothing a true story?

What prizes has Patrick Radden Keefe won?

Footnotes

Lisanne Swart

Thanks for reading,

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