Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe is an American investigative journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker whose books Empire of Pain and Say Nothing are considered masterworks of narrative nonfiction.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most accomplished American journalists working today. His books expand the deep-dive investigative reporting he is known for in magazines into full narrative arcs that sustain hundreds of pages. Say Nothing (2018) examines the murder of Jean McConville — a widowed mother of ten abducted by the IRA in 1972 — and the broader story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, centering on the lives of the perpetrators and the ideological world that produced them. Empire of Pain (2021) traces the Sackler family’s role in the American opioid crisis through three generations of a pharmaceutical dynasty.

Both books demonstrate the same qualities: exhaustive reporting, precise prose, and an ability to render complex institutional and historical forces through specific, vividly drawn human beings. Say Nothing is the more emotionally devastating — Keefe’s portrait of Dolours Price and the psychology of political violence is one of the most nuanced treatments of that subject in nonfiction. Empire of Pain is the more ambitious in scope, using the Sacklers as a lens for examining how wealth insulates individuals from accountability.

Keefe is not an activist journalist — he presents evidence and argument, but avoids polemic — and this restraint makes his conclusions land harder. Both books are essential reading for anyone interested in American and recent Western history, and they represent narrative nonfiction at its most skilled.