A financial history of the Vatican, from the loss of the Papal States through the Second World War and into the Banco Ambrosiano collapse.
Dense and heavily documented. The wartime chapters are the hardest, and the book is careful to distinguish what is established from what is inference, which matters given the subject.
What carries it is the institutional argument. An organisation with sovereign status, no external audit and a moral mandate is structurally vulnerable in ways that have nothing to do with belief.
Read March 2015.