Keefe nimbly guides us through the thicket of family intrigues and betrayals.

... masterfully damning.

Written with novelistic family-dynasty and family-dynamic sweep, Empire of Pain is a pharmaceutical Forsythe Saga, a book that in its way is addictive, with a page-turning forward momentum. We see the Sacklers moving from marketing to entrepreneurship to art collecting to philanthropy to ignominy. It is an American story, and an American tragedy—and travesty.

In Empire of Pain, Keefe marshals a large pile of evidence and deploys it with prosecutorial precision.

In his impressive exposé the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe lays the blame [for the opioid crisis] directly at the feet of one elite family, the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma. The decisions that birthed and perpetuated the epidemic were not made by employees or a management team, he reveals, but by members of this cultured clan of physicians, long acclaimed for their arts philanthropy.

Put simply, this book will make your blood boil.

Keefe has a way of making the inaccessible incredibly digestible, of morphing complex stories into page-turning thrillers, and he's done it again.

... the fullest picture of Sackler family dynamics so far, including what the family knew about OxyContin’s dark side and when.

... a work of nonfiction that has the dramatic scope and moral power of a Victorian novel.

... among the revelations in Keefe’s tour-de-force account is the degree to which the Sacklers pioneered the aggressive advertising and direct selling to doctors of the US pharmaceutical industry.

Patrick Radden Keef...has written an immersive, compelling and illustrative book about a unique family that was able to use the system that they helped create to make themselves rich beyond belief, and to become renowned philanthropists on the order of Rockefeller and Carnegie, while keeping their activities largely unknown, and contributing to the destruction of hundreds, if not millions, of lives.

Keefe offers a forensic account of the Sackler family’s direct involvement.

It made me understand that one kind of carelessness can be born of great wealth—but another kind can be born of great conviction. In addition to being a Shakespearean tale of human nature, Empire of Pain offers several lessons about our world.

Not only does he detail exactly how the opioid crisis began and grew—it was no accident—he drags into the spotlight one of the most secretive, wealthy and powerful families in corporate America and holds them to account.

Indefatigable investigative journalist Keefe crafts a page-turning corporate biography and jaw-dropping condemnation of the Sacklers’ amoral disregard for anything save the acquisition of power, privilege, and influence. In Keefe’s expert hands, the Sackler family saga becomes an enraging exposé of what happens when utter devotion to the accumulation of wealth is paired with an unscrupulous disregard for human health..

History repeats itself and disaster ensues in this sweeping saga of the rise and fall of the family behind OxyContin.

Richly researched.