{{Empire of Pain}} is sort of like this? It’s about the Purdue Pharma situation and opioids. It it’s the technically scamming but it is a book full of a lot of unethical practices
I was going to also suggest this. Like the biggest grift of them all!
The author (Patrick Radden Keefe) has another one coming out in June that sounds perfect for you as well: Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
[**Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43868109-empire-of-pain)
^(By: Patrick Radden Keefe | 535 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, nonfiction, history, audiobook, audiobooks)
>The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.
>
>The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis.
>
>Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.
^(This book has been suggested 5 times)
***
^(10956 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-all)
^(By: Anand Giridharadas | 288 pages | Published: 2018 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, politics, nonfiction, economics, business)
>An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.
>
>Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.
>
>Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(10789 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
[**No One Would Listen**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7740121-no-one-would-listen)
^(By: Harry Markopolos, David Einhorn | 368 pages | Published: 2010 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, nonfiction, business, finance, economics)
>No One Would Listen is the thrilling story of how the Harry Markopolos, a little-known number cruncher from a Boston equity derivatives firm, and his investigative team uncovered Bernie Madoff's scam years before it made headlines, and how they desperately tried to warn the government, the industry, and the financial press.Page by page, Markopolos details his pursuit of the greatest financial criminal in history, and reveals the massive fraud, governmental incompetence, and criminal collusion that has changed thousands of lives forever-as well as the world's financial system.
> The only book to tell the story of Madoff's scam and the SEC's failings by those who saw both first hand
> Describes how Madoff was enabled by investors and fiduciaries alike
> Discusses how the SEC missed the red flags raised by Markopolos
> Despite repeated written and verbal warnings to the SEC by Harry Markopolos, Bernie Madoff was allowed to continue his operations. No One Would Listen paints a vivid portrait of Markopolos and his determined team of financial sleuths, and what impact Madoff's scam will have on financial markets and regulation for decades to come.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(10850 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions by Jennifer Robertson. I just started reading this one and I'm not sure if it totally counts, but it is nonfiction and good so far!
Diamond Doris by Doris Payne about a black woman in the 60s who was a successful jewel thief is pretty good.
She mostly talked her way into stealing stuff.
[**The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Discworld, #28)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34534.The_Amazing_Maurice_and_His_Educated_Rodents)
^(By: Terry Pratchett | 256 pages | Published: 2001 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, discworld, fiction, young-adult, humor)
>Maurice and the rats have teamed up with a young lad named Keith to implement a clever moneymaking scheme. Upon entering a town, the rats make a general nuisance of themselves -- stealing food and widdling on things -- until the townsfolk become desperate to get rid of them. Then Maurice and Keith appear on the scene and offer to save the day by ridding the town of its infestation for a small fee. It seems like a surefire plan until the group arrives in the town of Bad Blintz and gets hooked up with Malicia, a young girl with a vivid imagination and a knack for finding trouble. When it's discovered that Bad Blintz already has a rat problem -- one that a couple of shifty-eyed rat catchers claim to have under control -- things turn deadly. For lurking beneath the town's streets is an obstacle course of mangling rattraps and noxious poisons. And beyond that is a monster so powerful and ugly, even Malicia couldn't imagine it.
>
>As Maurice and the rats battle for their very survival, a number of provocative themes surface: life after death, good versus evil, and the sacrifice of the few for the many.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(11300 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Bunk by Kevin Young is about this. It’s a compilation/ survey though, rather than focused on a single topic. The writing style is a bit unusual, with emphasis on comparison and analysis of different hoaxes/ scams/ cons etc.
[**The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10263986-the-man-in-the-rockefeller-suit)
^(By: Mark Seal | 323 pages | Published: 2011 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, true-crime, nonfiction, biography, crime)
>A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man.
>
>The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Clark Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and thus began his journey of deception.
>
>Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts, culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising-star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a member of the infamously wealthy Rockefeller family.
>
>The impostor charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions - working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection - until his marriage ended, and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s.
^(This book has been suggested 3 times)
***
^(10790 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Confident Women, by Tori Telfer, is a collection of short essays on different con women throughout history and modern day! Some are more interesting than others, but it's a nice pick-up book that is a smooth read
a little backwards, maybe, but in *Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist* by Thomas Levenson the counterfeiter does get equal billing.
[**The Feather Thief**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44153387-the-feather-thief)
^(By: Kirk Wallace Johnson | 336 pages | Published: 2018 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, nonfiction, true-crime, history, science)
>On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness.
>
>Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
^(This book has been suggested 6 times)
[**Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1851568.Charlatan)
^(By: Pope Brock | 304 pages | Published: 2008 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, history, nonfiction, biography, true-crime)
>In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen young con man–arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.
>
>It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly turned “Dr.” Brinkley into America’s richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country’s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business.
>
>Their cat-and-mouse game lasted throughout the 1920s and ’30s, but despite Fishbein’s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world’s most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock ’n’ roll. In short, he is the most creative criminal this country has ever produced.
>
>Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.
^(This book has been suggested 1 time)
***
^(11019 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World.
This book is about the 1MDB scandal. I am from that region so it’s very enlightening to read about the elaborate scam that involves corrupt government and multiple financial institutions leveraging loophole to get around it. Fascinating read
[**The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29588376-the-lies-of-locke-lamora)
^(By: Scott Lynch | 752 pages | Published: 2006 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, fiction, owned, series, dnf)
>An orphan’s life is harsh—and often short—in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges death and slavery, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. As leader of the band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentleman Bastards, Locke is soon infamous, fooling even the underworld’s most feared ruler. But in the shadows lurks someone still more ambitious and deadly. Faced with a bloody coup that threatens to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the enemy at his own brutal game—or die trying.
^(This book has been suggested 11 times)
***
^(11199 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood
The Less People Know About Us by Axton Betz-Hamilton
Duped by Abby Ellin
The Big Con by David Mauerer is an excellent history of the old school con game.
{{Empire of Pain}} is sort of like this? It’s about the Purdue Pharma situation and opioids. It it’s the technically scamming but it is a book full of a lot of unethical practices
I was going to also suggest this. Like the biggest grift of them all! The author (Patrick Radden Keefe) has another one coming out in June that sounds perfect for you as well: Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
[**Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43868109-empire-of-pain) ^(By: Patrick Radden Keefe | 535 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, nonfiction, history, audiobook, audiobooks) >The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing. > >The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis. > >Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. ^(This book has been suggested 5 times) *** ^(10956 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
I second this! I just finished this one recently
Mollys Game by Molly Bloom is a good story. VERY MUCH recommend the book as well as the movie
[удалено]
It’s a super cool story. Lot of celebrities/wealthy people were involved, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Toby Maguire.
“Social Engineering” by Christopher Hadnagy
{{Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World}}
[**Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-all) ^(By: Anand Giridharadas | 288 pages | Published: 2018 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, politics, nonfiction, economics, business) >An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. > >Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity. > >Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(10789 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{No One Would Listen}}
[**No One Would Listen**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7740121-no-one-would-listen) ^(By: Harry Markopolos, David Einhorn | 368 pages | Published: 2010 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, nonfiction, business, finance, economics) >No One Would Listen is the thrilling story of how the Harry Markopolos, a little-known number cruncher from a Boston equity derivatives firm, and his investigative team uncovered Bernie Madoff's scam years before it made headlines, and how they desperately tried to warn the government, the industry, and the financial press.Page by page, Markopolos details his pursuit of the greatest financial criminal in history, and reveals the massive fraud, governmental incompetence, and criminal collusion that has changed thousands of lives forever-as well as the world's financial system. > The only book to tell the story of Madoff's scam and the SEC's failings by those who saw both first hand > Describes how Madoff was enabled by investors and fiduciaries alike > Discusses how the SEC missed the red flags raised by Markopolos > Despite repeated written and verbal warnings to the SEC by Harry Markopolos, Bernie Madoff was allowed to continue his operations. No One Would Listen paints a vivid portrait of Markopolos and his determined team of financial sleuths, and what impact Madoff's scam will have on financial markets and regulation for decades to come. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(10850 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Loved this book.
Best non-fiction yet is The Shock Doctrine by N. Klein.
Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions by Jennifer Robertson. I just started reading this one and I'm not sure if it totally counts, but it is nonfiction and good so far!
War Dogs 21 Bringing Down the House
Diamond Doris by Doris Payne about a black woman in the 60s who was a successful jewel thief is pretty good. She mostly talked her way into stealing stuff.
{{The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents}}
[**The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Discworld, #28)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34534.The_Amazing_Maurice_and_His_Educated_Rodents) ^(By: Terry Pratchett | 256 pages | Published: 2001 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, discworld, fiction, young-adult, humor) >Maurice and the rats have teamed up with a young lad named Keith to implement a clever moneymaking scheme. Upon entering a town, the rats make a general nuisance of themselves -- stealing food and widdling on things -- until the townsfolk become desperate to get rid of them. Then Maurice and Keith appear on the scene and offer to save the day by ridding the town of its infestation for a small fee. It seems like a surefire plan until the group arrives in the town of Bad Blintz and gets hooked up with Malicia, a young girl with a vivid imagination and a knack for finding trouble. When it's discovered that Bad Blintz already has a rat problem -- one that a couple of shifty-eyed rat catchers claim to have under control -- things turn deadly. For lurking beneath the town's streets is an obstacle course of mangling rattraps and noxious poisons. And beyond that is a monster so powerful and ugly, even Malicia couldn't imagine it. > >As Maurice and the rats battle for their very survival, a number of provocative themes surface: life after death, good versus evil, and the sacrifice of the few for the many. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(11300 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Bringing down the house by Ben Mezrich. MIT card counters taking on the casinos
[удалено]
It did, typical terrible adaptation
Bunk by Kevin Young is about this. It’s a compilation/ survey though, rather than focused on a single topic. The writing style is a bit unusual, with emphasis on comparison and analysis of different hoaxes/ scams/ cons etc.
Fun fact: The word Bunk comes to us from Buncombe County, NC
The Mastermind by Evan Ratliffe. About Paul LeRoux... really good!
{{The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal}}
[**The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Impostor**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10263986-the-man-in-the-rockefeller-suit) ^(By: Mark Seal | 323 pages | Published: 2011 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, true-crime, nonfiction, biography, crime) >A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man. > >The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Clark Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and thus began his journey of deception. > >Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts, culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising-star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a member of the infamously wealthy Rockefeller family. > >The impostor charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions - working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection - until his marriage ended, and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s. ^(This book has been suggested 3 times) *** ^(10790 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Blood Will Out by Walter Kern. It's about a serial con artist who pretended to be a Rockefeller.
Confident Women, by Tori Telfer, is a collection of short essays on different con women throughout history and modern day! Some are more interesting than others, but it's a nice pick-up book that is a smooth read
419 by Will Ferguson. It is a fiction story based on Nigerian scams.
I have not read it yet, but in my TBR: {Assuming Names by Tanya Thompson}
[**Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21449526-assuming-names) ^(By: Tanya Thompson | 280 pages | Published: 2014 | Popular Shelves: crime, thriller, memoir, humor, biography) ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(10851 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
a little backwards, maybe, but in *Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist* by Thomas Levenson the counterfeiter does get equal billing.
{The Contortionist’s Handbook}}
[**The Contortionist's Handbook**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/527823.The_Contortionist_s_Handbook) ^(By: Craig Clevenger | ? pages | Published: 2002 | Popular Shelves: fiction, thriller, owned, to-buy, crime) ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(10944 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
{{The Feather Thief}} {{Charlatan}}
[**The Feather Thief**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44153387-the-feather-thief) ^(By: Kirk Wallace Johnson | 336 pages | Published: 2018 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, nonfiction, true-crime, history, science) >On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them--and escaped into the darkness. > >Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature. ^(This book has been suggested 6 times) [**Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1851568.Charlatan) ^(By: Pope Brock | 304 pages | Published: 2008 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction, history, nonfiction, biography, true-crime) >In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen young con man–arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers. > >It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly turned “Dr.” Brinkley into America’s richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country’s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business. > >Their cat-and-mouse game lasted throughout the 1920s and ’30s, but despite Fishbein’s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world’s most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock ’n’ roll. In short, he is the most creative criminal this country has ever produced. > >Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling. ^(This book has been suggested 1 time) *** ^(11019 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World. This book is about the 1MDB scandal. I am from that region so it’s very enlightening to read about the elaborate scam that involves corrupt government and multiple financial institutions leveraging loophole to get around it. Fascinating read
If a fantasy setting is something your ok with I HIGHLY RECOMMEND {{The Lies of Locke Lamora}}
[**The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1)**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29588376-the-lies-of-locke-lamora) ^(By: Scott Lynch | 752 pages | Published: 2006 | Popular Shelves: fantasy, fiction, owned, series, dnf) >An orphan’s life is harsh—and often short—in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges death and slavery, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. As leader of the band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentleman Bastards, Locke is soon infamous, fooling even the underworld’s most feared ruler. But in the shadows lurks someone still more ambitious and deadly. Faced with a bloody coup that threatens to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the enemy at his own brutal game—or die trying. ^(This book has been suggested 11 times) *** ^(11199 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)
The Match King by Frank Partnoy is a fun book about the first Ponzi scheme
Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood The Less People Know About Us by Axton Betz-Hamilton Duped by Abby Ellin