You Never Give Me Your Money, By Peter Doggett

This thoroughly researched, brilliantly related work begins with "five shots of a large calibre weapon" outside New York's Dakota Building in 1980. Paul McCartney responded to the most famous death in rock music with the spectacularly ill-judged comment, "Drag, isn't it?" and Ringo Starr "never brought up the events" while dining that night at Mr Chow in Beverly Hills.

However, the incisive Doggett insists that the murder of John Lennon "affected every atom" of the surviving Beatles. Respooling to 1969, he explores the group's disastrous Apple experiment (Harrison: "Basically, it was chaos"), their venomous financial bust-up and Lennon's permanent departure for New York in 1971: "It's fucking great over there."