When one hears of a journalist dying in pursuit of a story, one immediately imagines some strafed and cratered combat zone. But as investigative writer Terry Gould is quick to point out in his new book, war is not the chief cause of death in the profession: murder is. Nearly three-quarters of journalists killed since 1992 have been victims of targeted assassinations – and virtually all of the individuals who orchestrated the killings have escaped punishment.

In Murder Without Borders, Gould travels to five brutal kleptocracies – Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia, and Iraq – where the most expedient form of press censorship is a bullet or a bomb. In what ultimately proves to be a four-year saga, he researches the lives of seven slain journalists and tries to answer the question of why his subjects insisted on reporting stories they knew would probably get them killed.

The answers vary widely. Guillermo Bravo Vega martyred himself to atone for his own criminal past. Marlene Garcia-Esperat was driven by her religious conviction. Anna Politkovskaya wrote to assuage her shame over her country’s moral collapse. All of them knew that demanding accountability from the regimes they lived under would lay the foundation of social justice.

Gould supplies us with copious, scrupulously researched details gleaned from the victims’ friends, colleagues, family members, and even tormentors, and proves himself as adept at recounting a charming childhood anecdote as unflinchingly analyzing a murder scene. He writes skilfully and sensitively, with laudable modesty and candour, and is careful not to compose cloying hagiographies of the glorious dead. His subjects are fully human, sometimes exhibiting prickly demeanours, or inurement to their loved ones’ suffering, or momentary failures of nerve.

Murder Without Borders begins with a quote from Vaclav Havel, himself no stranger to tyranny and crushing reprisal: “I am not interested in why man commits evil; I want to know why he does good.” Gould’s admirable book confronts us with examples of rare, beleaguered, fragile goodness – goodness so dangerous to those in power that it had to be stamped out.