Simpson and Fritsch tell the story in brisk, workmanlike prose ... For readers who've been following the news closely since 2016, their book offers an intriguing step behind the scenes of familiar headlines and fills in gaps about the public understanding of Fusion GPS and the role it has played before and since Trump's election ... People who aren't closely engaged might find Crime in Progress to be tougher sledding as it delivers a rockslide of names, dates, cross-connections and bite-size explainers ... It also is a story without an ending, the authors write, because central questions about Trump — and whether powerful Russians or others may have some hold on him — haven't been resolved, they say ... As for skeptics or Trump supporters? Let's not kid ourselves; this book was not written to bring them in or change their minds ... Critics will find objectionable passages on nearly every page.

Simpson and Fritsch try to tell the story as clearly as they can, but more money means more convolutions ... [they] are able guides to a byzantine world; their presentation is methodical, almost lawyerly, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. When reading a story full of weird financial transactions, narratives and counternarratives, it’s helpful to have everything laid out as plainly as possible — even if the layers of chicanery are sometimes so densely packed that their syntax gets squeezed into ugly shapes ... For a couple of guys who spent their careers investigating how money can shape incentives, or at least appear to, they seemed for a while either defensive or naïve when it came to the murkier aspects of their own business model ... Fusion’s conservative critics doubtless won’t be placated by this book, even though the authors say that those critics were ultimately what made the book possible ... reads like a morality tale about unintended consequences.

... an entertaining and readable account of the dossier’s origins, and of the cosmic fall-out once Buzzfeed put it online, to Fusion’s fury ... doesn’t radically alter our understanding of the collusion saga, but there are plenty of colourful details and anecdotes. Once Trump shuffles off stage – in 2020 or later – a movie version seems highly likely.

Whether Simpson and Fritsch’s score-settling, tell-all account will change any minds remains to be seen, but they present a mountain of evidence that Trump’s dealings with corrupt foreign players—particularly those from the former Soviet Union—are both real and go back decades ... Critics will likely take issue with some of the authors’ others claims, including their contention that others bear the brunt of the responsibility for the confidential dossier leaking, not them ... it becomes evident that in the past few years [the authors] have thrown nearly as much chum to the media as the keepers have to the seals at the National Zoo, up the street from their Dupont Circle offices ... Some readers of Crime in Progress may begin to wonder if the special counsel Robert Mueller didn’t miss the mark. The authors praise Mueller for documenting more than a hundred and forty suspicious contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russians, and for criminally indicting thirty-four individuals, including six in Trump’s inner circle and a dozen Russian agents behind the hack of the Democrats’ e-mails and thirteen individuals and three companies tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency. But they criticize Mueller’s probe for failing to heed the main lesson of Watergate: to 'follow the money' ... By getting their version of events out to the public, in advance of that of the Justice Department, the authors have performed a neat bit of publishing jujitsu. But the truth about Trumpworld is that no form of journalism is quite fast enough to keep up with every new development, because there is always another potential 'crime in progress.'

So what to make of Simpson and Fritsch? Are they devilish deep-state operators who will stop at nothing? Or a couple of old hacks fighting to establish the truth? The latter seems more plausible than the former. But it does feel as if Simpson and Fritsch have become a little spooked by Russia, viewing Putin as an omniscient global spymaster-general, rather than as a cunning but constrained operator.

What you think of the new book by Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch — better known as the men behind the Steele dossier — will depend almost entirely on what view you take of the dossier itself. Is your position that the infamous document is a sham product cobbled together by Democratic operatives out to smear the president? Crime in Progress is unlikely to convince you otherwise. Are you still holding out hope for the release of a lewd video of Donald Trump in a Moscow hotel room, so tantalizingly described in the dossier? Crime in Progress won’t sate your desire for the 'pee tape,' but it also won’t disprove the tape’s existence if you want to believe in it ... is most interesting as an addition to the burgeoning genre of journalism about journalism — media that, in a truth-starved time, seeks to explain not only the reporter’s conclusions but also how the reporter arrived at them ... whether or not one approves of Fusion as an enterprise, Simpson and Fritsch’s efforts to justify some of their ­less-savory work begin to drag the story down ... they are frustratingly coy about some of the dossier’s more controversial claims ... The strangeness of the Steele dossier as a political artifact is that, in the storm of the Mueller report and the ongoing Ukraine scandal, its significance has largely faded outside the circle of Trump’s most ardent supporters. In Crime in Progress, Simpson and Fritsch do their best, not always convincingly, to renew the case for its overarching importance.

The authors carefully lay out their evidence, including charges that are only now coming to light ... Red meat for Trump foes and a convincing denunciation of the Republicans’ 'win-at-all-costs electoral strategies.'