Michael Lewis is one of the great non-fiction authors of our time. He brilliantly tells tales involving highly technical details in ways that are entertaining and engaging, and–like any great artist–he makes the feat look easy. Lewis uses the colorful character and language of his subjects and weaves their personal stories into the greater picture.

The topic of Flash Boys is high-frequency trading (HFT). High-frequency traders utilize the fastest hardware, software, and internet connections–all carefully located–to engage in arbitrage schemes that suck billions of dollars from investors by beating their trades to the exchanges and raising the prices. What is most disturbing is how so many of the exchanges, banks, and brokers enable it, profit from it, or are complicit in it.

Flash Boys follows the men who exposed this dark underworld of Wall Street and set out to create their own alternative stock exchange that would play by its own rules, rules that are fair to investors. It also follows two other stories connected the HFT movement. This is a great story told by a great storyteller, and it is essential reading for anyone who desires a better understanding of how the world works.