April has been an eventful month for the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Last week, Keefe, who has written for the magazine since 2006, published his latest surreal investigation, about a wild scheme involving intentional highway collisions, crooked New Orleans lawyers, and millions of dollars in bloated insurance payouts. Days earlier, Keefe’s latest book, “London Falling”—a gripping expansion of a previous New Yorker investigation—arrived in stores. It’s currently No. 1 on the Times best-seller list for hardcover nonfiction.

In 2014, Keefe received a National Magazine Award for “A Loaded Gun,” a characteristically layered, surprise-filled inquiry into a terrible crime. Four years earlier, a neurobiologist named Amy Bishop had sat silently for nearly an hour through a gathering of her colleagues, faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who had rejected her bid for tenure. At the meeting’s end, Bishop removed a weapon from her purse and fatally shot three of them. The killings were shocking enough, but another twist was yet to come: the discovery that, more than twenty years earlier, a shooting had taken place in Bishop’s childhood home, in Massachusetts, under circumstances that continued to stir local suspicions about Bishop, her parents, and the police chief. As Keefe reveals each new turn in the story, your eyes may widen. “There are people in our community who are walking time bombs,” a lawyer tells him. “They are so hard to identify.”