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On the fifth of December 2024, a major newspaper ran the front-page story “Insurance CEO Gunned Down In Manhattan”. The report then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a killer who then walked coolly away”. The murder in broad daylight was truly chilling and disturbing. But many Americans reacted differently: for those who faced insurance rejections or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt cathartic. Online platforms erupted. One comment read: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company created to increase earnings on your health.”

Less than a week after, Luigi Mangione, a good-looking, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a graduate degree in computing, was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He awaits trial on federal and state charges of murder, with the district attorney seeking the death penalty. So who is Mangione? And what might have motivated the alleged crime? These are the questions John H Richardson seeks to resolve in an investigation that delves into wider topics, too.

Understanding the Person

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson spent years researching the groups that lurk in the dark corners of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears about an apocalyptic future”. To uncover “the making” of his subject, Richardson first examines Mangione’s extensive reading. We learn that “[when] he was taken into custody, Luigi had a list of nearly three hundred titles on a reading platform”. Their content covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “focus on his own personal growth, both physical and mental”. Additionally, Richardson sifts through his communications with online personalities and authors as well as his many posts on social media. These primary sources, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead present him as an amorphous figure. Richardson attempts to explain this by suggesting that “Luigi’s elusiveness, in fact, is what gives him a little of that old trickster magic”. Throughout the book, Richardson tries to frame his subject in archetypal terms.

Mangione is deeply anxious about the world around him, one where ‘everything is accelerating whether we like it or not’

Interpreting the Incident

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson uses as a clue three words – “delay”, “refuse” and “remove”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the terms occasionally employed by medical insurers to reject claims. He looks at the indication Mangione suffered from a chronic back condition, which could have been a reason for an attack, but finds no proof; instead, what significance there is seems to rest in Mangione’s philosophical dread about the world around him, one where “the pace is quickening whether we like it or not, sliding faster and faster to the edge”; a world where the general belief seems to be that AI is going to eventually either take control, or destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are interviews with the key individuals. Richardson made requests, but never expected access to Mangione himself. And his family made it clear that they had decided against speaking to the media in advance of the trial. Another flashing-yellow omission is any significant information about the victim, Thompson, though we learn that under his leadership, from 2021 to 2023, company earnings increased by 33%.

Ambiguous Findings

By book’s end, the audience has no clear understanding of Mangione’s character or what could have driven his alleged crimes. Worse still, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been exposed to a subtle approval of an assassination. In the book’s final lines, Richardson delivers his fairytale assessment: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the insane ruler, the monster in the maze and the emperor without clothes.” In that tale “Robin Hoods 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 continues in its attempts have accusations that could lead to the ultimate sentence thrown out, any reference of myths, Robin Hoods, heroes or monsters will not be allowed in court in defence of this handsome young man with a “features reminiscent of classical art” facing judgment for murder.