I listened to Crime in Progress during a week when I was also reading through declassified congressional testimony transcripts as background for a different project, and the combination was instructive. Simpson and Fritsch write in the register of people who have spent years documenting things carefully because they know documents can be denied but contemporaneous records are harder to dismiss. The book has the specific texture of investigative journalism produced by people who were being closely watched while they produced it, precise, sometimes defensive, and ultimately more interesting for the stakes it was written under.
The setup is well-known by now. In autumn 2015, Fusion GPS, the Washington-based intelligence and research firm founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, was hired by a Republican client to investigate Donald Trump’s business record ahead of the primary season. What began as a standard opposition research project expanded, as the evidence accumulated, into something the authors had not anticipated: a pattern of financial connections to Russia that appeared to involve organized crime networks and, eventually, to the Kremlin itself. They hired Christopher Steele to help interpret the Russian dimension. Steele produced what became the notorious dossier.
First, the Big Picture
The book’s central value is that Simpson and Fritsch were there. They describe the specific investigative decisions they made, the sources they developed, the moments when evidence they had gathered for months suddenly appeared in news coverage with no acknowledgment of where it originated. The experience of watching a story they had been reporting be simultaneously leaked, distorted, and denied, while being personally targeted by a coordinated political campaign to discredit them, gives the account a specificity that secondary accounts of the same events cannot match.
The New York Times described this as the best procedural yet written about the discovery of Trump’s Russia ties, and that seems right as a generic judgment. Rachel Maddow’s endorsement, that she felt steeped in the subject and learned something on every page, reflects the book’s value for readers who followed the story closely as it developed but encountered it primarily through broadcast and newspaper reporting rather than from the investigative record.
Why Listen to Crime in Progress
Mark Deakins brings a quality that this kind of political nonfiction requires above almost everything else: the ability to read factual assertions about complex financial and political relationships in a way that makes them land as documented reality rather than partisan claim. The material is inherently contested, the authors are primary participants with a clear perspective, and the events they describe remain politically charged. Deakins reads without performing outrage or alarm, which is exactly the right approach. The facts, as Simpson and Fritsch present them, are alarming enough without editorial amplification.
At twelve hours, the pacing is efficient. The book covers four years of investigation chronologically, and Deakins keeps the timeline clear even when the story moves between parallel threads in Washington, London, and Moscow. The narrative tension is genuine, at several points, Simpson and Fritsch believed they were in physical danger, and those passages come through in Deakins’s reading with appropriate weight.
A Few Reservations
The book is written by two people who are central participants in the story they are telling, which means readers should engage with it as a primary source account rather than a neutral history. Simpson and Fritsch are not neutral observers. They were hired to find damaging information, they found it, and they spent years being attacked for it. Their perspective on the events is clear and consistent, and their conclusion, that Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence whether or not he was a witting one, is stated explicitly at the book’s end.
Listeners who found the Mueller investigation’s conclusions adequate or who believe the Steele Dossier was fabricated will not find this persuasive. Listeners who followed the story and wanted more detail about how the investigation actually operated will find it comprehensive and sometimes revelatory.
Should You Listen to Crime in Progress?
Listeners interested in investigative journalism and the mechanics of intelligence research will find this a detailed and instructive account of how that work actually functions, with all its uncertainty and dead ends. Those who followed the Trump-Russia story in real time and want to understand how the major evidence trails developed will find this more complete than any single newspaper or magazine account. Readers looking for political balance in their nonfiction should be aware this is explicitly the authors’ account of events they participated in, written from their perspective, and should be read alongside other accounts of the same period.
In Brief
- Read by: Mark Deakins reads Simpson and Fritsch’s account with the controlled urgency of a seasoned political narrator, lending credibility to passages that risk sounding implausible without the right voice.
- At its heart: investigative journalism, political corruption, the mechanics of intelligence work
- Vibe: Propulsive, alarming, and methodically documented
- Short version: The most primary-source account of the Steele Dossier and Fusion GPS’s Trump investigation available, indispensable context for anyone who followed the story and wants to understand how it actually developed.
