American · b. 1976
Patrick Radden Keefe reports for The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer, and writes books that read like thrillers because the reporting behind them leaves no gaps to guess at. Say Nothing reconstructs the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast widow and mother of ten, and follows the IRA members who carried it out through the rest of their lives; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize, and FX adapted it for television in 2024. Empire of Pain traces three generations of the Sackler family from Arthur Sackler's pharmaceutical advertising to OxyContin, and won the Baillie Gifford Prize. Earlier came Chatter, on electronic surveillance, and The Snakehead, on a Chinatown smuggling ring. Born in Boston in 1976, Keefe studied at Columbia, Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Yale Law School. He built the podcast Wind of Change around a rumour that the CIA wrote a Scorpions ballad. London Falling, published in 2026, follows a London family into the criminal underworld their nineteen-year-old son had entered before his death.