Hooked on true crime woven through history in The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson? Chase The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum next.

If Larson's interwoven tapestry of architectural ambition and serial horror left you hungry for more history that doubles as a thriller, Blum delivers precisely that alchemy in Jazz Age New York. Here, the glittering speakeasies and Prohibition excess conceal an epidemic of untraceable poisonings—arsenic in wallpaper, radium in cosmetics, cyanide in bootleg gin—while two dogged forensic pioneers transform primitive autopsies into chemical warfare against killers who thought science would never catch them.

Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler become the heroes you didn't know you needed, wielding test tubes like weapons in a city drowning in toxins and corruption. Their breakthroughs read like detective fiction, except the stakes are corpses and courtrooms.

This is what happens when real poison cases outpace any crime novelist's imagination.