One of the masters of literary satire and humor writing, Henry Fielding takes on true crime in this novel, offering readers a wild ride as tumultuous and twisted as the book's original tongue-twister of a title: The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. This exaggerated but mostly true account details the life of criminal mastermind Jonathan Wild, a top English policemen who also ran a notorious nationwide network of thieves in the early eighteenth century.