In the hands of a lesser writer, the story of how high-speed traders are skimming pennies off transactions on Wall Street could be mind-numbingly arcane. But Michael Lewis, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and best-selling author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, and The Blind Side, knows how to tell a story, even one that he freely admits is dauntingly impenetrable.

“If it wasn’t complicated, it wouldn’t be allowed to happen,” Lewis told Steve Kroft in a 60 Minutes segment that aired last night. “The complexity disguises what is happening.”

He added, “The stock market is rigged.”

In a nutshell, Lewis writes in his new book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (itself an outgrowth of this Vanity Fair article from 2013), what’s happening is that some savvy, if unscrupulous, traders are using their ability to operate faster than everyone else to make some free money. The easiest technique to explain involves spotting someone else’s intention to purchase some stocks, jumping ahead of them to make the buy, and then selling the shares to the intended buyer at a slightly inflated price. (In fact, Lewis explains in this excerpt, these high-speed traders make a lot more money on something called “slow-market arbitrage”: “This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges before those exchanges were able to react.”)

Related "Goldman's Geek Tragedy," by Michael Lewis, September 2013

All that complexity is offset in Lewis’s telling by a collection of Hollywood-ready characters. There’s Brad Katsuyama, a kind of anti-Jordan Belfort, who first notices that something weird is happening with his trades and sets out to discover the problem—and, in a very un-Wall Street move—help others protect themselves from it. There’s Ronan Ryan, “the world’s expert at helping the world’s fastest stock-market traders be faster” who also seemed to be “doing a fair impression of a Dublin handyman.” There’s Constantine Sokoloff, a Russian math whiz who led a team of “Puzzle Masters” dedicated to testing a new system for foiling the high-speed traders. (Hollywood blog editors, start your fantasy-casting engines now.)

You can tell that Lewis—whose 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, more or less defines our understanding of Wall Street in the 80s—has struck a nerve from the rhetoric being produced by those he’s targeting.

“Critics of technological advancements in the market do not ground their arguments in data,” a high-frequency-trading advocate named Peter Nabicht recently wrote on the site modernmarketsinitiative.com. “Instead they base their appeals on opinion, seeking to generate animosity and skepticism towards high frequency technology, automation and electronic platforms.”

Memo to Mr. Nabicht. Get your data together, if you have any, because until you can express yourself like Michael Lewis, your appeals to opinion are destined to fall flat.