The Strange Case of the Tom Ripley of Book Publishing

I've heard whispers about the "Spine Collector," as he's come to be known, for years now. The New York Times published a story about it last December; Vulture did a long-form feature on it in August 2021 that is one of the most compulsively gripping long-read investigations of absurdly meaningless true crime journalism I've read in a while (though the ending is, admittedly, not very satisfying). — Read the rest