Description
Book SynopsisEvan Ratliff is an award-winning journalist and the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of
The Atavist Magazine. As a longtime contributor to
Wired, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, and other magazines, he has reported from around the globe on transnational crime, science and technology, the environment, terrorism, and corruption. He is a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards, and his writing has been selected for numerous
Best American collections. His 2009
Wired story Vanish, about his attempt to disappear and the public's effort to find him, was selected by the magazine as one of the twenty best stories in its history. He also cohosts the acclaimed
Longform podcast and was a founding editor of
Pop-Up Magazine, a live journalism event that tours the United States. He is the co-author of
Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World, about innovation and counterterrorism, and the edito
Trade ReviewWith his relentless and fearless reporting, Evan Ratliff has pried open a hidden world filled with high-tech gangsters and drug kingpins and double-crossers and stone-cold hitmen. The story is as fascinating as it is terrifying, and one that will hold you in its grip. * David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z *
One of the most prodigious criminal masterminds or modern times. Compelling... meticulously researched and written with a feverish intensity. A masterwork of investigative journalism. * Daily Mail *
A true crime classic. * Publishers Weekly *
This is a riveting, mesmerizing, absolutely bonkers story about a man as brilliant as he is villainous. You'll find yourself sucked in, freaked out, and, ultimately, blown away by Ratliff's storytelling and tireless reporting. The Mastermind is a masterpiece. * Nicholas Thompson, editor in chief, Wired *
The best book I read this year
. It is the insane story of an internet drug lord and the years it took to bring him down. I read this with my heart in my throat—not just because of the violence and mystery, but because it made me jealous as a journalist (how’d he find that out?) and, though it is a true story, as a novelist. -- Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman Is in Trouble * GQ - Best Books of 2019 *
