Carlos Barrágan just wanted to understand what had happened to his mother. How could she, an accomplished, professional, middle-class woman who had raised three sons on her own, fall prey to a romance scammer pretending to be a U.S. soldier in Syria who was likely in reality a young man based in Lagos, Nigeria? As first detailed in his 2023 feature for the Atavist magazine and now expanded into his first book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers, Barrágan, a journalist in Madrid, thought he was going to find some measure of justice for his mother, and also take a closer look at the male loneliness epidemic. What he discovered, through this outstanding work of immersion journalism (written in English, his second language), was a far more complex