Toobin’s narrative unfolds like a tragedy.

This 450-page work is more than a journalist emptying his notebook of all his interviews and insights. It is more than a legal expert analyzing how the best work of talented and committed lawyers could be frustrated by governmental rules and rivalries within the executive and legislative powers in our federal system.

Any writer would struggle to make this material thrilling. Even if there were some suspense or mystery around the outcome, the topic is the bureaucracy of governance. This dry terrain is not just the context of the book’s events, but also the field of struggle on which Democrats chose to battle Trump. As in the news cycle, so in the hardcover book: the chosen areas of investigation are so circumscribed, and the fine details of the potential crimes so difficult to grasp, that they slip from the attention almost as they enter it.

Specific sources usually go unnamed, and Toobin also relies on reporting and analysis by The Washington Post, the New York Times, Lawfare and others. Put together, this all gives the book an authoritative, omniscient-narrator quality, particularly when Toobin goes inside the deliberations of Mueller and his team.

... vivid and doggedly reported.