The Poisoner's Handbook

I love that this reads like a gritty detective novel, but it also reveals how two New York scientists virtually invented forensic toxicology during prohibition and the Jazz Age. Before their pioneering work, a poisoner could easily get away with murder; medical examiners had no way to detect deadly compounds like arsenic, mercury, cyanide, or thallium, even if they suspected foul play.

I found Blum’s depiction of true-life criminal cases and the work of the medical investigators hard to put down.

A fun romp through many famous cases where “he done her in” (or vice versa) by such varied poisons as arsenic, strychnine, potassium cyanide, cyanide of mercury (even deadlier than potassium!), with an analysis of the policing and chemists’ methods used to nab the perpetrators. Not as common today as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, death by poison was once the preferred, most devious, means for people to eliminate their enemies, ex-lovers, husbands, and wives. Taste that drink before you down it!