In 2006, an oddball group of bankers and traders from some of the world’s largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor—the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions of dollars in loans worldwide—was set daily by a small team of easily manipulated functionaries, and that they could reap huge profits by nudging it to suit their trading portfolios. Tom Hayes, a brilliant but troubled math genius, became the linchpin of a wild alliance that included a French trader nicknamed “Gollum”; a Kazakh chicken farmer turned something short of a financial whiz kid; a Swiss banker with a tendency to drunkenly accost women in bars; a karaoke-loving executive who would falsely boast about his role in a 1990s rock band; and a not-very-bright broker who spent much of his leisure time wiping out on his motorcycle. Hayes’s circle would produce the era’s most covert and most substantial financial scandal—until it all unraveled in a spectacularly vicious fashion.

Deeply investigated by award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter David Enrich, The Spider Network is not only a rollicking account of the scam but a provocative examination of a crooked financial system, full of wheeler-dealers able to concoct elaborate connections between dollars and doughnuts, but not their rapacious actions and the law.