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On December 5, 2024, a leading publication ran the headline “Insurance CEO Shot Dead In Manhattan”. The report then noted that Brian Thompson was “fatally wounded from behind in Midtown Manhattan by a assailant who then calmly departed the scene”. The daytime killing was indeed both cold and shocking. But many Americans reacted differently: for those who faced insurance rejections or faced exorbitant healthcare costs, the news felt like a release. Online platforms erupted. One post stated: “All jokes aside … no one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That’s the job of the artificial intelligence system the insurance company designed to maximize profits on your health.”

Five days later, Luigi Mangione, a handsome, 26-year-old University of Pennsylvania alumnus with a master’s in computer science, was arrested at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He faces court proceedings on criminal counts of murder, with the district attorney seeking the capital punishment. So what is his background? And what might have motivated the accused offense? These are the questions John H Richardson attempts to answer in an investigation that delves into wider topics, too.

The Making of a Subject

A journalist for Esquire magazine, Richardson spent years researching the groups that exist in the hidden parts of the internet, writing stories about people “cursed with realistic fears 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 nearly three hundred titles on Goodreads”. Their subject matter covered climate change to masculinity, along with a “emphasis on his own self-improvement, both body and mind”. Furthermore, Richardson sifts through his communications with influencers and authors as well as his many posts on digital networks. These primary sources, meant to paint a portrait of Mangione, instead render him an amorphous figure. Richardson attempts to explain this by suggesting 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 deeply anxious about the world around him, one where ‘change is rapid whether we like it or not’

Interpreting the Incident

As for “the meaning” of the title, Richardson uses as a clue three words – “postpone”, “deny” and “remove”, engraved on the bullets left behind at the crime scene. These are the phrases occasionally employed by medical insurers to deny coverage. He looks at the indication Mangione had a chronic back condition, which could have been a reason for an attack, but discovers no confirmation; instead, what significance there is seems to rest in Mangione’s existential anxiety 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 destroy us, or both.

Gaps in the Narrative

Conspicuous by their absence from the book are conversations 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 press in advance of the trial. Another glaring gap is any detailed data about the deceased, Thompson, though we learn that under his guidance, from the early 2020s, company earnings rose significantly.

Ambiguous Findings

By book’s end, the reader has no clear understanding of Mangione’s personality or what could have driven his alleged crimes. More troubling, Richardson’s apparent empathy for him gives the reader the disturbing feeling of having been privy to a veiled endorsement of an assassination. In the book’s closing remarks, Richardson presents his mythical interpretation: “We’ve entered a time of fables, the insane ruler, the monster in the maze and the naked leader.” In that fable “outlaw heroes come with a beautiful promise … They arrive in times of social turmoil, when the population is in pain and everything is confusing anymore.”

One thing is clear: as Mangione’s legal representatives continues in its attempts have charges that could lead to the ultimate sentence thrown out, any reference of fables, folk heroes, 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.