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In the best-selling Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, David Enrich, the finance editor of The New York Times, shows how greed and unchecked ambition toppled Deutsche Bank from its position as a paragon of European institutional lending.

While its true that just about every bank under the sun has been attached to one or more financial scandals over the years, Deutsche Bank really has been involved in a disproportionate number, Enrich says on this weeks podcast. But to me, the better measure of its destructive capacity is the havoc its wreaked around the world. You can really look in probably almost every continent of the world and see some major and pretty bad scandal that the bank was involved with that caused real harm.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave visits the podcast this week to discuss her first novel for adults, The Mercies, which was inspired by a witch hunt in 17th-century Norway.

There wasnt that much concrete research that I could go to, to fall back on and really give it a solid grounding, Hargrave says. The trials were staggering in their scale, and yet even in Norway, theyre not talked about, theyre not taught in schools. The Salem witch trials are ubiquitous, even here in the U.K., and in Norway their equivalent just isnt discussed. The silence around these trials was very interesting to me.

Also on this weeks episode, Dwight Garner, Jennifer Szalai and John Williams talk about recent reviews. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Timess critics this week:

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Reviews podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

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The Ties That Bind Deutsche Bank and Donald Trump - The New York Times