In this treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, the author aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers - to "analyse, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. The author uses a variety of examples from history and from headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence . 'Compelling, haunting, tragic stories . . . resonate long after you put the book down' James McConnachie, Sunday Times Book of the Year.

The routine traffic stop ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives?

Using stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences.