American Rage

From the co-authors of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Idaho Four, an in-depth investigative account of Luigi Mangione’s motivations to commit a crime that polarized the nation and mobilized Gen Z.

On December 4, 2024, a masked gunman was seen on security cameras fatally shooting Brian Thompson, a health insurance CEO in front of the New York Hilton Midtown at 6:44 a.m. 

Following a five-day manhunt that mesmerized the public, twenty-six-year-old Luigi Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania and indicted on multiple state and federal criminal charges.   

To some, he’s a calculating villain. 

To others, he’s a hero, a symbol of frustrations with the American health care system. By mid-June 2026 he’d received 7,000 letters, poems, and songs, and over 42,000 donors had donated more than $1.5 million to his defense fund. 

But who is Luigi Mangione, really? 

An Ivy-League-educated coder, game developer, world traveler, and idealist. An elder member of Gen Z, the first generation to live their lives wholly online. A high school valedictorian who predicted that “a revolutionary near future” is “the only logical conclusion.” A sufferer of chronic back pain who on August 15, 2024, wrote in his journal: “The target is insurance. It checks every box.” Two years later,  Mangione stated in federal court: “On the morning of December 4, 2024, I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died,” adding, “I knew what I was doing was illegal.” 

American Rage is the first investigative book about what led to Thompson’s murder. Based on hundreds of original interviews with insiders who knew both the confessed killer and his chosen victim, it is an exposé of the personal cost of American health care and a generational portrait of those pushing back against a broken system.