A new podcast from M. Gessen explores an ugly family secret.

M. Gessen, the prolific author with bylines in The New York Times and The New Yorker, has launched a new podcast in partnership with Serial Productions and the Times.

“The Idiot” follows Gessen’s cousin Allen, a sketchy business man. “If someone had set out to write an unlikable international huckster character, they couldn’t have laid it on any thicker,” our narrator quips, by way of intro.

Allen arrives in the States one day with his mother and small child in tow, having left his wife Priscilla under murky circumstances. Gessen suspects foul play, but they’re alone in this theory. The rest of the Gessen family is less alarmed.

Hosted, written, and reported by M. Gessen, the show’s five episodes follow one journalist’s efforts to unravel Allen’s lies. Gessen connects with Priscilla, who is stranded in Moscow. In the first episode, they help her launch a kidnapping petition that ends in court—but not for the case anyone was expecting.

“Allen, it seemed, had hired someone to kill Priscilla,” Gessen says. “His ex-wife, the mother of his children.”

Gessen’s narrative voice, so sharp on the page, can drift into monotone in the audio format. But “The Idiot” appeals on the strength of its vulnerability.

Though Allen and his misdeeds are the evident subject, reflective asides and interviews with the rest of the Gessen family make this a drama of self-excavation. The animating question is, how could the family have allowed this to happen?

“I was shocked at how shocked I was,” Gessen confides, towards the end of episode one. Even as they recognize that, in theory, violence can bloom out of any community.

“Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals. And I wouldn’t even call Allen an upstanding citizen,” they tell us. “But it’s one thing to know, and another thing to understand.”

At first listen, the new podcast has echoes of “Serial,” season one, and represents a pleasing return to Koenigian form. I’d been missing the New New journalism, in which obsessed oral investigators show their skin in the game.

What’s even more compelling than a true crime? A personal one.