Dark Wire

Cox spent nearly a decade tracking the Anom sting before writing it up, and that reporting depth shows: he had access to court records and sourcing detailed enough to reconstruct verbatim scenes from inside both the FBI's operation and the criminal networks it was built to entrap. The book's structural trick, cutting between the law enforcement side building a backdoored encrypted phone network and the cartel and gang figures unknowingly adopting it, borrows the pacing of a thriller without sacrificing the reporting's rigor. Cox doesn't shy from the uncomfortable question of how far a government should go in order to prosecute the people it's surveilling.