In July of this year, Andy Coulson, former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and David Cameron’s disgraced director of communications, was sentenced to serve 18 months in jail for his part in one of the greatest scandals of our time. His undoing began in 2009 when Nick Davies, a freelance journalist at the Guardian, first broke the story about the use of phone hacking at Coulson’s paper.

Hack Attack, Davies’ stunning work of investigative journalism, follows a trail of tapped phones, hacked voicemails and bribed officials to piece together a network of law-breaking journalists, who operated with impunity and without fear of repercussions. This is a ruthless club, with hard drinking, drugs and questionable morals all par for the course. These ‘hacks’ had thought themselves invincible; there was no celebrity beyond their reach and no boundary they wouldn’t cross in the quest to catch an exclusive.

While this story might begin in the dark corners of the now-closed tabloid newspaper News of the World, we quickly realise it also spills into Fleet Street and Scotland Yard, and even runs through the corridors of 10 Downing Street. There are moments in this narrative that you will remember from the headlines – most notably, the News of the World’s deletion of messages from missing teen Milly Dowler’s voicemail, an act that gave her parents false hope she was still alive. However, Hack Attack is more than a selection of shocking stories ‘ripped from the headlines’. It is a comprehensive and fascinating account of how modern journalism and journalists lost their way (and their humanity) in a devastating race to the bottom.

Throughout this book Davies subtly reminds us that this is a crime in which many are complicit: from those at the very top to the hacks and private investigators tapping phones; the police too inept or unwilling to prosecute to the people willing to betray those closest to them; and, ultimately, the consumer, who signalled their acceptance with a purchase worth £1.

Brigid Mullane is a freelance reviewer.