Much crime, as Raymond Chandler delighted in telling us, hinges on two human failings. The first is that most of us are greedy. The second is that most of us are chumps, easily distracted by shiny things and the promises of con artists.

Consider Alex Murdaugh. The South Carolina lawyer, whose inherited wealth rested on a legacy of corruption and violence, wasn’t content with his millions. He wanted more, as Valerie Bauerlein writes in her superb real-life whodunit The Devil at His Elbow (Ballantine Books, Aug. 20). And not just money: Murdaugh could swallow a case of whiskey and a trunkload of oxycodone, it seems, and still demand another round. To fund his habit, he conned millions from his unknowing clients while the bankers and other solid citizens of Hampton County looked the other way. To keep that habit a secret, among other motives, he murdered his wife and son. The law finally caught up with Murdaugh, but not without plenty of cat-and-mouse that Bauerlein recounts with a fine sense of both the drama and the mundane details of police work. The moral? Given local politics, if Murdaugh hadn’t been a touch too greedy—to say nothing of murderous—he might well be free today.

Murdaugh looks to be a rank amateur, though, next to a “morbidly obese, fifty-seven-year-old felon with two bad knees and kidney cancer,” as Craig Whitlock describes the subject of his book Fat Leonard (Simon & Schuster, May 14). A Malaysian street hustler, Leonard Francis believed he was smart enough to get away with anything. He did, for a time: he made millions by swindling the U.S. Navy, keeping the brass knee-deep in enough hookers, fine drink, and gewgaws that they looked the other way, too. Eventually someone in accounting figured out what was going on, more than 90 admirals came under investigation, still more junior officers fell on their swords, and a great crime spree came to an end—not bad work for a high school dropout with an unfailing sense of exactly where the officers’ moral compasses could be made to go off course.

Did Fat Leonard get that way from fast food? We don’t know. Neither do we know why, given billions of burgers sold, McDonald’s needs to advertise at all. Yet for many years McDonald’s offered a kind of Willie Wonka ticket with million-dollar prizes—and for many years, every winner was connected, mysteriously, to every other winner. It took another accountant, this one with an FBI badge, to figure out how the scam worked, write James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte in McMillion$ (Grand Central, Aug. 2). As they recount, a bottom-tier ex-cop wormed his way into the confidences of the advertising firm that administered the contest, then joined forces with a dimwitted mobster to con a bunch of guppies into believing that his Ponzi scheme would earn them fortunes as they scammed the burger giant—which, though embarrassed, pitched in to help the FBI bring the grifters down. As so often happens, the biggest crook in the yarn earned less time than some of his minions, some of them greedy, some of them mere chumps—and that, dear reader, brings us full circle.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.