The opioid epidemic has ravaged the nation and claimed the lives of thousands. How did we, as a nation, get to this point? How did the medical practice of “pain management” become a for-profit scheme conducted by pharmaceutical companies seeking to keep addicts as repeat customers?

Charlotte Bismuth’s Bad Medicine: Catching New York’s Deadliest Pill Pusher provides detailed insight into how America’s opioid problem can be pinned not to a single moment or person but to the negligence of systems intended to improve vulnerable people's lives, and to the indifference of people in positions of power within that system. Rather than placing the blame on a definitive cause, this knowledgeable account emphasizes overarching systemic failures, rooted in the greed of those who are meant to “do no harm.”

Bismuth, a graduate of Columbia Law School and a former prosecutor, describes the case of Dr. Stan Xuhui Li, the first doctor in New York state charged for and convicted of homicide based on the overdose deaths of his patients. Bismuth joined the New York County District Attorney’s Office in 2008 as an appellate attorney, and in 2010 she transferred to the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor. In December of that year, the office received a tip from an NYPD detective about a physician who was “prescribing medication to young kids who don’t need it.” Bismuth was asked to dig into the complaint, which kicked off her yearslong journey of bringing Li to justice.

The doctor, who was based in New Jersey and employed as an anesthesiologist at a teaching hospital, had opened a basement clinic in Flushing, Queens, that soon became a popular pill mill. Li was found to have written prescriptions for patients even after concerned family members begged him to stop. And though he didn't physically force patients to abuse their medications, Li’s actions, or rather lack of actions, contributed to the overdose deaths of 16 patients, “some within a few days, some within a month or a few months; others within a year” of their last meeting with Li at his office.

Bismuth writes in the author’s note that her book “does not purport to be a journalistic overview” but “a memoir from the trenches.” Told in nonchronological order, Bad Medicine isn't a stuffy, detached reenactment of the trial. Bismuth provides the necessary background to contextualize the opioid crisis, the evolution of related laws and the requirements of legal procedures, but she also shares the personal chaos that influenced her courtroom battle, including the breakdown of her marriage and contentious divorce, the demands of parenting and the crushing dread of depression and anxiety.

Some readers may wonder why the narrative switches focus from chapter to chapter, hopping from the nitty-gritty aspects of building a case to reflections on the author's inability to live up to her own expectations in her personal life, but the overall result shows Bismuth’s commitment to a higher calling. Bismuth came to know the victims’ surviving relatives as well as the deceased themselves. She portrays Li not as a doctor who cared too much or trusted his patients to a fault but as someone who had all the right educational training and chose to keep endangering his patients anyway—whose apathy and need for financial gain overruled his sacred duty as a doctor.

The greatest strength of the book is the author’s ability to break down the legal jargon of the court system and the prosecution’s evidentiary path to conviction. The text links each piece of evidence in a clear path to confirm Li’s self-serving motivations, despite the jumps in the timeline. Bismuth humanizes Li’s patients and does not pass judgment on their substance abuse problems.

For readers who prefer more of a straightforward nonfiction account that centers on the scientific data rather than the messiness of the human condition, Bismuth’s work may be too close to the bone. However, Bismuth does not claim to offer the final authoritative take on the opioid epidemic but instead provides one important piece of the puzzle.

The past several years have ushered in a wave of social upheaval and, in turn, a people’s revolution, whether by marching in the streets or by quietly but decisively reforming outdated values. These changes aren’t limited to the United States, however. India has also seen its share of shifting attitudes, particularly toward women, girls and sexual violence.

In 2012, though India was listed as one of the most dangerous places in the world to be female, its citizens were shocked into outrage by the rape and murder of a young medical student as she returned home from watching a movie. Mass protests and publicity stirred the government to reconsider how its justice system tried sexual crimes. 

In the wake of these events, journalist Sonia Faleiro traveled to India to investigate and document the status of Indian girls and women. Before she arrived, however, a second incident tore through the country: Two teenage girls in Uttar Pradesh, a low-caste, high-poverty farming region, were found hanging from a tree in an orchard not far from their homes. What erupted afterward lay bare caste divisions, family strife, political corruption and stubborn attitudes toward women, girls and sexual purity.

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is a thoughtful, careful narrative of these events and an examination of the many issues influencing this tangled case. Faleiro reconstructs scenes using multiple thorough interviews with the people who were present, and she takes care to never insert herself into her retelling. Through her, however, the reader comes to know the people involved. Padma and Lalli (renamed in the narrative due to Indian law prohibiting the release of the names of victims) were two girls who bear so many of the utterly familiar hallmarks of teenage girldom. Their families, friends and neighbors, in whom love, tradition and despair interweave, become familiar as well. The reader also comes to know the cultural topography of India as a country in flux, where tradition and the rigid “safeguarding” of women hold fast in some corners, while in others women wear jeans and ride public transportation while their parents plan to send them on to higher education.

Even as corruption and hope vie with one another politically and poverty touches everything, The Good Girls never loses sight of the human heart of its story. It brings us close to these people and their problems and heartaches and, in so doing, makes us examine our own.

The true crime genre has been so successful in podcasting that one might forget it originated in publishing. Becky Cooper, formerly of the New Yorker, has already drawn comparisons to In Cold Blood with her true crime masterpiece, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence—and for good reason.

On a winter night in 1969, Jane Britton, a 23-year-old grad student in the Harvard anthropology department, was brutally murdered in her Boston apartment. Aspects of the crime scene suggested that her murderer may have had some knowledge of ritualistic burials. For decades, rumors suggested that a powerful archeology professor killed her. Cooper, herself a Harvard graduate, finally decided to find out.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: We chatted with author Becky Cooper about her transformation into an investigative journalist and the community she found along the way.

Over the course of 10 years, Cooper turns over every stone trying to identify Jane’s killer. She perseveres mightily in her investigation, driven in part by the way she identifies with the quirky, complicated victim. This identification may draw in readers who see themselves in Jane, too. But for others, the author’s embrace of a stranger who died 50 years prior may never quite gel. The book is strongest when we’re empathizing with Jane—her romantic foibles, grappling with sexism within academia—rather than with the author.

For aspiring journalists, Cooper’s impressive work in We Keep the Dead Close is a masterclass on how to do investigative reporting. She dug deep into archival research and interviewed most everyone involved in the case, drawing uncomfortable information out of her sources with particular skill while still withholding judgment. Along the way, the narrative ventures down rabbit holes and zigzags from Cambridge to Hawaii to Iran to Labrador.

Cooper’s 10-year investigation is a meandering one that may drag on for readers who want a neat and tidy resolution. For everyone else, there’s so much to chew on in We Keep the Dead Close. The resolution, when it comes, is as unexpected as it is heartbreaking.

Tyler Maroney, a former journalist and co-founder of the private investigation firm QRI, loves his job. And in his debut book, The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World, he explains why he thinks the work of corporate investigators is not only fascinating and fulfilling but also vitally important to the public.

Today’s private investigators aren’t just the stereotypical lone gumshoes we see in books and movies—although classic methods like surveillance and creative deception are still crucial. Modern-day corporate investigators’ work for “large companies, government agencies, A-list movie stars, professional athletes, non-profits, sovereign countries,” et al., is often performed by large firms that either employ or contract out people with a broad range of skills, from FBI agents to tech whizzes and former librarians.

In 10 quirkily titled chapters (“Bare Feet”; “A Cigar, a Cookie, and a Canoe”), Maroney introduces just such people and recounts memorable assignments he and his colleagues have undertaken, including recovering stolen money and exposing political corruption. The characters Maroney describes are plentiful and varied. There’s the former cop and confidential informant who recanted his paid-for-by-police testimony to help a wrongly convicted man regain his freedom, a wealthy couple on the lam with their beloved dogs, and a BBC reporter who falsified a portion of his TV expose about the garment manufacturer Primark.

Maroney’s thoroughness renders The Modern Detective a textbook of sorts, with blow-by-blow descriptions of each job, extensive details about investigators’ favored tools, specifics about licensing exams and more. It’s also a helpful resource for those concerned about their personal or professional security. Learning what information investigators look for and the methods they use to obtain it is sure to be instructive for anyone who wants to increase their privacy, protect their assets . . . or perhaps make a clean getaway.

A neatly planted cornfield in Iowa might not seem like the setting for an international trade war, but looks can be deceiving. Mara Hvistendahl, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, has been writing about China for over a decade. A former Midwesterner who is equally comfortable in farmers’ kitchens as in her high-rise apartment in Beijing, Hvistendahl is uniquely situated to tell this unexpectedly dramatic story.

Robert Mo originally came to the U.S. to pursue a career in thermodynamics. Unable to land a tenure-track job in academia, Mo accepted a lucrative position at a Chinese agricultural company. Soon, Mo was on the road to various Midwestern towns.

Police reports record sightings of “an Asian man in a suit, standing in a cornfield.” Mo was seeking corn samples from the biggest companies in the business, Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, and he was not alone. Many companies seek shortcuts to the kinds of high-performing strains of corn that are private intellectual property in the U.S. Mo soon finds himself trailed by FBI agents, and a slow game of cat-and-mouse ensues. One larger-than-life corn consultant, Kevin Montgomery, tries to piece together the puzzle while drinking lemonade on his back porch. As Montgomery’s interviews with Hvistendahl suggest, the tactics of both the Chinese and the FBI are equally baffling for an insider in corn genetics.

Chinese agricultural espionage has been a topic of increasing significance, but where do our ideas about China come from? In The Scientist and the Spy, Hvistendahl traces the particulars of Mo’s case, but she also explores the racialized history of FBI investigations into Chinese immigrants. Her careful contextualization of the case makes its particulars loom with the uncertainty of a fun house mirror. Those who seem like perpetrators look, in certain lights, like victims, and the victims like perpetrators. As the “truth” of the case itself fades from visibility, what remains is the feeling that the case is, as Hvistendahl puts it, “a Rorschach test” for views on the Chinese technology threat. To find your own perspective, read this fascinating story, which speaks to the larger geopolitical tensions shaping our time.

We live in an era that feels awash in crime case forensic evidence. Every day, news comes of DNA tests that have exonerated long-imprisoned innocents or nabbed villains in cold cases. An entire generation has grown up watching the CSI franchise on television, and jurors tend to expect some Gil Grissom-like savant to testify, even when that’s not realistic.

That was hardly the case a century ago. Police relied on third-degree interrogations, and science just wasn’t in the picture. But slowly, a handful of forensic pioneers changed the criminal justice landscape. One of the most prominent was Edward Oscar Heinrich, a largely forgotten figure whose riveting story is revived in Kate Winkler Dawson’s American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI.

After finishing her well-regarded Death in the Air, Dawson was looking for a follow-up project when she stumbled on the voluminous Heinrich papers at the University of California at Berkeley. She literally had to persuade the university to catalog the neglected collection so she could do her research. It produced archival gold.

Heinrich was a headline name in the 1920s and ’30s as a key criminologist in high-profile murder cases. Dawson structures her book around his most mysterious and sensational cases—among them, a bloody train robbery that netted almost no money, the killing of a priest solved in part through handwriting analysis and the multiple trials of a Stanford University employee who may or may not have bludgeoned his wife in her bathtub.

Heinrich forged the way in blood pattern analysis, ballistics, forensic photography, polygraphs and criminal profiling. Yet he was often frustrated by juries who were baffled by his work, and importantly, he wasn’t always right. He trusted forensic science too much; as Dawson reminds us, we now know that handwriting, blood and gun evidence is far from flawless. Like Heinrich himself, she argues, we need to continue pushing forward in the never-ending quest for true justice.