DAVID TOLLY

David H. Tolly's newest book, FOUNDING CRIMES: How Smuggling, Fraud, and Treason Built the United States, is explosive narrative history for America's 250th anniversary. Tolly delivers the other founding story: the Declaration is a signed confession of treason.

The Revolution was financed by smugglers. A legislature was bribed to sell an empire of land. None of it is metaphor — all of it is documented. Reading the founding like a prosecutor's case file, it's built for readers of David Grann, Erik Larson, Jill Lepore, Sarah Vowell, James Loewen, and Joseph Ellis. The charges are real. The evidence is signed. The case is still open.

Tolly spent 40 years as a turnaround CFO in nearly 50 companies, reading the documents everyone else skimmed. He also wrote the Hidden Series — Hidden Profit, Hidden Cash, Hidden Options, Being a CFO, The 13-Week Cash Forecast, Hidden Value — and the Clean Series crime novels, beginning with Clean Hands.