Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

The full inside story of Theranos and founder/CEO Elizabeth Holmes, a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Back by investors, Theranos sold shares that valued the company at $9 billion and put Holmes' net worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem...the technology didn't work.
(Description from catalog)

Dugdale ran head-first towards the action, spearheading the first aerial terrorist attack in British history and pulling off the biggest art theft of her time. In 1974, she led a gang into the opulent Russborough House in Ireland and made off with millions in prized paintings, including works by Goya, Gainsborough, and Rubens, as well as Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid by the mysterious master Johannes Vermeer. Dugdale thus became - to this day - the only woman to pull off a major art heist. (Description from NoveList.)

In this spellbinding story, award-winning investigative journalists for CNN Money track down the mysterious French psychic at the center of one of the longest running cons in history--an international mail scam that targets the elderly and emotionally vulnerable.
(Description from catalog)

Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the "welfare queen" myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day.
(Description from catalog)

Why do we love stories about scammers so much? Journalist Tori Telfer dives into the stories of historical female con women and explains why we are so enamored by their scams. (Description from catalog)

From a photo editor at Vanity Fair comes the true account of her friendship with "Anna Delvey"--a woman posing as a German heiress who conned her out of $62,000--and her quest to obtain justice. (Description from catalog)

Two Pulitzer-finalist Wall Street Journal reporters document the true story of how a young social climber orchestrated one of history's biggest financial heists, exposing the secret nexus of elite wealth, banking, Hollywood and politics. (Description from NoveList)

On a cool June evening in 2009, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist grabbed hundreds of bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier - and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds?
(Description from catalog)

An expose of the Varsity Blues scandal reveals how an unscrupulous college counselor named Rick Singer preyed on the desperation of wealthy, upper class, insecure parents who sought to have their children admitted to elite colleges to maintain their ownsocial status.

Analyzes the perilous world of the international fossil trade through the story of one man's devastating effort to sell a Gobi Desert dinosaur skeleton from a nation that forbids natural-history trafficking.
(Description from NoveList)