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On the fifth of December 2024, a leading publication ran the headline “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The article then noted that Brian Thompson was “shot in the back in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was indeed both chilling and disturbing. But many Americans reacted differently: for those who had been denied health insurance or struggled with medical bills, the news felt cathartic. Social media blew up. One post stated: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who should live or perish. That’s the job of the artificial intelligence system the insurance company designed to increase earnings on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, twenty-six-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in computer science, was arrested at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. So what is his background? And what drove the alleged crime? These are the questions John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an inquiry that explores broader themes, too.

The Making of a Subject

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson spent years researching the communities that lurk in the dark corners of the internet, producing articles about people “plagued by genuine concerns about an end-times scenario”. To reveal “the making” of his subject, Richardson first examines Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was arrested, Luigi had a list of 295 books on a reading platform”. Their content ranged from climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his communications with online personalities and authors as well as his many updates on social media. These original materials, intended to depict a picture of Mangione, instead present him as an amorphous figure. Richardson attempts to explain this by proposing that “Luigi’s mystery, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Throughout the book, Richardson attempts to cast his subject in archetypal terms.

Mangione is profoundly worried about the world around him, one where ‘change is rapid whether we like it or not’

The Meaning Behind the Crime

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson takes as his lead three words – “delay”, “refuse” and “depose”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases occasionally employed by health insurance companies to deny coverage. He examines the evidence Mangione had a long-term spinal issue, which might have provided motive for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; instead, what meaning there is seems to lie in Mangione’s philosophical dread about the world around him, one where “everything is accelerating whether we like it or not, moving rapidly to the edge”; a world where the consensus seems to be that AI is going to eventually either take control, or eliminate humanity, or both.

Missing Pieces

Notably missing from the book are conversations with the key individuals. Richardson asked, of course, but never expected access to Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had decided against speaking to the press in prior to the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from 2021 to 2023, company earnings rose significantly.

Unclear Conclusions

By the conclusion, the audience has no clear understanding of Mangione’s personality or what could have driven his accused actions. More troubling, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the uncomfortable impression of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a era of stories, the insane ruler, the beast in the labyrinth and the emperor without clothes.” In that tale “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in times of social turmoil, when the people are suffering and everything is confusing anymore.”

One thing is clear: as Mangione’s defence team works to have charges that could lead to the ultimate sentence thrown out, any reference of myths, Robin Hoods, heroes or villains will not be allowed in court in support for this attractive individual with a “jawline … and lips … out of a Caravaggio painting” facing judgment for murder.