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 and foolhardy guys in lab coats tipping test tubes of mysterious chemicals into their own mouths.” —NPR: What We're Reading A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice. In 2014, PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE released a film based on The Poisoner's Handbook.

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 and foolhardy guys in lab coats tipping test tubes of mysterious chemicals into their own mouths.” —NPR: What We're Reading A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice. In 2014, PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE released a film based on The Poisoner's Handbook.

Writing with the high style and skill for suspense characteristic of the very best mystery fiction‚ Deborah Blum shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. In The Poisoner's Handbook she draws from original research to track the fascinating‚ perilous days when forensic scientists Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler began their trailblazing chemical detective work‚ in an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime.

The Poisoners by Marjorie Bowen is about the newly hired lieutenant Charles Desgrez and a group of female poisoners who are conducting witchcraft and poisoning members of high society to influence King Louis XIV's reign. Excerpt: "In the year 1676 Madame de Brinvilliers was executed in Paris for the murders of her father, her two brothers, and a sister. It was known that she had procured the mysterious poison that she had employed through the agency of one Sainte-Croix, who, in his turn, had received it from an Italian, Exile, whom he had met when both these scoundrels had been imprisoned in the Bastille for minor offenses."

The Poisoners is a history of four devastating chapters in the making of the region, seen through the disturbing use of toxins and accusations of poisoning circulated by soldiers, spies, and politicians in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Imraan Coovadia’s fascinating new book exposes the secret use of poisons and diseases in the Rhodesian bush war and independent Zimbabwe, and the apparent connection to the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States; the enquiry into the chemical and biological warfare programme in South Africa known as Project Coast, discovered through the arrest and failed prosecution of Dr Wouter Basson; the use of toxic compounds such as Virodene to treat patients at the height of the Aids epidemic in South Africa, and the insistence of the government that proven therapies like Nevirapine, which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, were in fact poisons; and the history of poisoning and accusations of poisoning in the modern history of the African National Congress, from its guerrilla camps in Angola to Jacob Zuma’s suggestion that his fourth wife collaborated with a foreign intelligence agency to have him murdered. But The Poisoners is not merely a book of history. It is also a meditation, by a most perceptive commentator, on the meaning of race, on the unhappy history of black and white in southern Africa, and on the nature of good and evil.

Else poisoned her husband as a token of her love for Erika. Alone in her prison cell Else relives who and what had brought her there – Erika and their secret language, Erika’s enabling mother, Else’s jealous mother-in-law, her abusive husband and his appalling secret, the words of oppression. “Elsechickgorgeousyou you are like a blank white sheet of paper on which I am the Word. You are like the nothingness that I first efface because I have Words to put into the emptiness. Because I am the Word so-to-say.”

“This fine social history charts the changing patterns of using poison” and the forensic methods developed to detect it in the Victorian Era (The Guardian, UK). Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in some ways even defined the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann’s dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with scientific and legal authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. Separating fact from Hollywood fiction, Stratmann corrects many misconceptions about particular poisons and their deadly effects. She also documents how the motives for poisoning—which often involved domestic unhappiness—evolved as marriage and child protection laws began to change. Combining archival research with vivid storytelling, Stratmann charts the era’s inexorable rise of poison cases.