Henriques was born in Bryan, Texas, and raised primarily in Roanoke, Virginia, where she was introduced to journalism through the Junior Achievement program at her public high school.
In 1989, she was hired by The New York Times,[3] where she earned the 1999 Gerald Loeb Award for Deadline and/or Beat Writing for as part of a team covering the near collapse of Long-Term Capital Management.
[3][8] In 2005, Henriques was a Pulitzer finalist for a series of articles, beginning in July 2004, that exposed the financial exploitation of young soldiers by insurance and investment companies.
[9] The articles spurred state regulatory action, congressional hearings, legislative changes, cash refunds for thousands of service members and the adoption of more stringent Pentagon rules governing financial solicitations on and around military bases.
[13][14] In 1981–1982, Henriques was a Senior Fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she began researching her first book under a grant from the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation.
The Wizard of Lies grew out of her work as the lead reporter in newspaper's coverage of the scandal that erupted on December 11, 2008, with the arrest of Bernard L. Madoff, the founder of a respected Wall Street brokerage firm who confessed in March 2009 to operating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Starting in September 1997, after a repetitive strain injury, Henriques became the first reporter at the New York Times, and one of the first at any major daily newspaper, to produce all her stories via speech recognition software rather than typing.