Michael Lewis has long been an essential guide to the skulduggery of the financial markets – from his debut Liar’s Poker, a brutal picture of his years as a Solomon Brothers bond salesman, to The Big Short, still the definitive text on the crash of 2007. Here, his subject is Sam Bankman-Fried and publication is synced to the FTX founder’s trial for fraud. Lewis had unparalleled access, shadowing the crypto kid for two years and speaking to almost everyone in his orbit. The author’s problem is what seems to be a sneaking regard for the self-proclaimed Effective Altruist’s untethered world view and dysfunctional behaviour. He gives time to staff thrown under the bus by FTX’s collapse but sheds little light on Sam himself. In crypto’s Week of Stupid, insight would be welcome but “I’d poke and prod and always come away with the sense that I’d learned less than I need to know,” he writes. The reader knows the feeling.