In a dust-choked attic in Edison, New Jersey, journalist Michael Gupta finds a tarnished silver locket stamped with a cryptic maker's mark. The chase that follows crosses archives on Rue des Capucins in Lyon, plating shops in Shenzhen's Longhua district, and a shuttered jewelry subcontractor in Łódź. By mapping customs ledgers, bill-of-lading microdata, and serial stamps hidden under patina, he reconstructs a century of metal moving through empires, tariffs, and gray markets. The locket becomes a compass through supply chains that quietly shape family memory and national policy.
Gupta interviews Agnieszka W., a Polish cutter who kept piece-rate notebooks; Liu Zhen, a foreman who smuggled cathode plates past a galvanic bath; and Fatou A., a Lagos stevedore turned union organizer at Apapa. Code he writes in a motel between truck depots scrapes SAP dumps and sanctions lists, while oral histories from Newark pawn brokers and Lyon metalworkers fill the gaps the datasets miss. The result is a forensic, humane narrative about risk, inheritance, and the costs hidden in small, beautiful things.
Michael Gupta (born 1983) is an American investigative journalist and data engineer whose reporting sits at the intersection of labor, technology, and risk. Raised in Edison, New Jersey, he studied electrical engineering at Rutgers (B.S., 2005) and information science at the University of Michigan (M.S., 2010). After working as a systems analyst in Midwest manufacturing, he reported for ProPublica and later served as a data editor for a London-based financial newspaper. His investigations have earned a Gerald Loeb Award and a George Polk Award, and have been cited by regulators in the U.S. and the EU.
Michael Gupta writes long-form nonfiction that braids archival research, field reporting, and code-driven analysis, moving from industrial sabotage to the intimate lives of supply chains and objects. He has taught courses on data reporting and industrial systems at Northwestern University and conducted fieldwork in Lyon, Shenzhen, Łódź, and Lagos. He splits his time between Chicago and Lyon. His books include Sabotage at Yannick (2025) and A Locket in the Attic (2026).
Une enquête patiente qui relie un médaillon terni à Edison, à la Rue des Capucins à Lyon, à Longhua à Shenzhen et au port d'Apapa à Lagos, brillante par ses données mais parfois trop froide pour que les voix rencontrées prennent toute leur place.
I wanted the human thread to lead more often.
Gupta keeps returning to inheritance and risk, asking what families pass along when objects outlast receipts. The locket becomes "a guide through hidden supply lines," and the metaphor mostly holds as he toggles between sanctions data and taped conversations.
I admired the ethical care with interviewees and the way gray markets are mapped without melodrama. Still, the argument about national policy sometimes diffuses into interesting tangents, leaving the thematic throughline a shade faint.
The book builds a material atlas of metalwork and movement, from the dust of an Edison attic to the reading rooms on Rue des Capucins, the acid smell in Longhua, and the salt-slick cranes at Apapa. What impressed me is how the places are not just backdrops but mechanisms that decide who gets paid, who gets sick, and who disappears from the ledger. Liu Zhen's bath line, a shuttered shop in Łódź, a Newark pawn counter, a customs window in Lyon—all become scenes that show how small objects carry state policy. Occasional repetition in port logistics creeps in, yet the sense of scale stays precise and sobering.
Gupta turns a found locket into a methodical chase that reads like field reporting stitched to an audit; the prose keeps toggling between tactile detail and table-ready numbers without losing clarity. Chapters mirror an investigator's notebook, hopping from Edison to Lyon to Longhua, and the transitions are clean enough that the datasets never feel like homework. I loved the quiet beats with Agnieszka W. and Fatou A., where price sheets meet memory. A few sections on tariff regimes thicken the flow, but he trims back with crisp scene work in the plating shops. Footnotes are purposeful, figures are reproducible, and the maker's marks serve as narrative breadcrumbs. It is rigorous and human.
