7 Books Like We'll Always Have Poison

I read a lot of thrillers but few have the wit of this author. The story started out with a typical premise but then leaped into a genre totally unexpected.

I love tasty writing as much as I do a juicy story. This book delivers on both counts.

It’s a murder mystery that reads like the best of literary fiction. I’ve been a fan of Kortya since devouring his earlier novel Those Who Wish Me Dead, which begins with a young boy witnessing a murder. This novel starts with a murder after the fact, on a rudderless boat adrift at sea: perpetrator unknown.

Its strong characters seem plucked from real life. Its twists and turns kept me guessing. Its humdinger of a climax kept me up past my bedtime. To work your way through the author’s oeuvre is to take a master class in writing, while being thoroughly entertained. More, please.

This is a great blow-by-blow primer on how the best investigative journalism is done. As a journalist, I admired the bravery of the author taking on the powerful people who propped up Theranos and its wunderkind founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

It reminds me of why I love the work I do, which is often leads to dead ends because someone doesn’t want you to know the truth. Books like Bad Blood show that it’s important to have investigative journalists who don’t give up the fight and end up saving lives by exposing fraud. 

I felt an affinity with Dr. Melinek partly because we both started our careers right before or right after 9/11 when we were both “learning the ropes” in our respective fields. In Dr. Melinek’s case, she had been working as an ME in New York City for two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks; I started as a graphic artist at the FBI just two months after, in November 2001.

I loved this book because it gives the real day-to-day experiences of a woman working in what could be a depressing, ghastly environment. However, the author keeps her sense of humor throughout while showing the utmost compassion for victims. I found myself nodding my head in agreement at some of the cases she worked on, especially the one with an unidentified victim. 

I read this book a few years before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is about how the US Government established a research lab on Plum Island, near the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

It describes the mistakes made regarding scientific and medical studies conducted on some of the important infectious diseases of the day, Lyme and West Nile. There were safety violations that could have led to an outbreak.

When I originally read it, I thought that there was no real global impact on these miscues and thought much of this was fear porn. We know today the effects of a global pandemic, and thinking back on it, I realize just how closely we came to a disaster. 

Dr. Maisel is a media giant. First and foremost, he is a cardiologist and scientist. His work on cardiac biomarkers for heart failure laid the groundwork for clinical lab testing that is conducted in every hospital in the world today. Besides his hundreds of medical and scientific publications, he is a local stand-up comic, a social media influencer, and an author of medical thrillers.

I like this book because it shows the bad side of the dark side of medicine, i.e., where profit and ego are prioritized over ethics. Maisel interweaves numerous accurate references to the importance of lab tests into his story.

Other medical books trivialize how the lab works. Doctors really don’t just go there, randomly look at a microscope slide, and have a diagnostic “aha” moment. 

Dr. Magnani has created a character, Dr. Lily Robinson, a stylish pathologist who has an encyclopedic knowledge of poisons. She uses her strong, investigational mind to solve some of the most difficult problems in medicine that anyone could face.

Dr. Robinson is not the media-portrayed stereotypical balding pathologist with thick glasses who walks around with a dirty lab coat and cannot carry out a conversation with live humans. Instead, she is confident and highly attractive, has long dark hair and captivating green eyes, and wears designer clothing.

The majority of clinical laboratory technologists are women. To move more into the limelight, the field needs strong role models for future generations, and Magnani has created one.