Losing the Signal is a good old-fashioned insider's business narrative, the kind we don't see enough of these days, and it should scare the pants off most CEOs.

Losing the Signal...fills in some details of the early history of BlackBerry. And its later chapters offer gripping details about the emotional and business turmoil surrounding its near collapse...This was a company that had $20 billion in revenue and changed the way we communicated. It's not likely we'll see that lightning strike again.

In Losing the Signal, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff tell the harrowing and riveting story of how we lost the connection to the BlackBerry, a communication device so innovative and addictive that it was known, among aficionados, as a Crackberry. It's a tale of rivalries, jealousies, and missed opportunities. You won't be able to put it down.

In the tech industry, they say that you learn more from a failure than from a hit. Well, if that's true, Losing the Signal will give you a postdoctoral education. Reading the inside story of the BlackBerry's helpless flameout is like watching any other train wreck: you're horrified, but you can't look away.

There have been many books about the smartphone maker, but none of the authors has had the same level of access to Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie as the duo behind Losing the Signal.

Unflinching.

JACQUIE MCNISH is a senior writer with The Globe and Mail and previously The Wall Street Journal. She has won seven National Newspaper Awards for her groundbreaking investigations into some of the biggest business stories of the past three decades. She is a regular host on BNN and an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She has authored three bestselling books: The Big Score: Robert Friedland, Inco, and the Voisey’s Bay Hustle; Wrong Way: The Fall of Conrad Black (winner of the 2005 National Business Book Award), with Sinclair Stewart; and The Third Rail: Confronting Our Pension Failures (winner of the 2014 National Business Book Award), co-authored by Jim Leech. In his 2005 New York Times review of Wrong Way, author Bryan Burrough praised her as “long one of Canada’s best business writers.” She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons.

SEAN SILCOFF is a business writer with The Globe and Mail and previously the National Post and Canadian Business magazine. He led the Globe’s coverage of the rise and fall of BlackBerry and has written extensively on many major Canadian business stories of the past two decades, including the takeover battle for telecom giant BCE, the contentious merger between brewers Molson and Coors, and the near-death struggles of manufacturing giant Bombardier Inc. He also oversaw the 1999 launch of the first Rich 100, Canadian Business’s annual list of the country’s wealthiest people. Sean has won two National Newspaper Awards, an Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award and the Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists. He lives in the Gatineau Hills, near Ottawa, with his wife and three children.