There’s a significant moment in Money to Burn on page 479: 

The revelations about Leon in the January 2026 Epstein data dump were more shocking and potentially dark and nefarious. We may never know the truth about these allegations, and Leon denies the substance of them. But, since you’ve made it this far in the tale, you are entitled to know about what cropped up in the files, as salacious and grotesque as they may be. 

‘Leon’ is Leon Black of the book’s subtitle, the founder, longtime leader and major shareholder of Apollo Global Management, a Wall Street giant in the fields of private equity and ‘alternative assets’. Everyone knows who Epstein was and what the subject matter of the ‘data dump’ is likely to have been. But the point is that if you have ‘made it this far’ through the thirty-six-year history of Apollo, you really will feel entitled to a revelatory change of tone, however grotesque.

William D Cohan is an acclaimed investigative storyteller and, as a former banker himself, a master of financial detail. His previous exposés of Lazard Frères, where he once worked, and Bear Stearns, the first major Wall Street house to collapse in 2008, are classics of the genre. He is also a respected contributor to the Financial Times and New York Times, and Money to Burn is his eighth book, all of which makes him a player in the world he writes about to the extent that he has become a presence in his own narrative, interjecting personal asides and conducting one-to-one conversations.

There’s nothing wrong with that if it brings a story to life, and it would be unfair to call Money to Burn self-­indulgent, given the diligence of Cohan’s research and the even-handedness of his reportage. But the book is, for the most part, too dense to be readily enjoyed by