Jo Thorneley is an Australian writer and the host of a comic podcast, ‘Zealot’. She asserts that she has an obsession about cults, and that is, no doubt, correct. Her book about the zealots who generally establish and profit in one way or another from cults is written in a witty, colloquial, stream-of-consciousness style. It aims to be – and succeeds in being – highly entertaining. It has no pretensions towards being learned or scholarly, but it is well researched and beguilingly thought-provoking.