The Poisoner's Handbook
Book description
Equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller, The Poisoner's Handbook is "a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie." —The New York Observer
“The Poisoner’s Handbook breathes deadly life into the Roaring Twenties.” —Financial Times
“Reads like science fiction, complete with suspense, mystery…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Poisoner's Handbook as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
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!
From John's list on crime and punishment in the Gilded Age.
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