"The horror occurred in a rustic farming enclave in modern-day Hungary. To look at the unlikely lineup of murderesses--village wives, mothers, and daughters--was to come to the shocking realization that this could have happened anywhere, and to anyone. At the center of it all was a sharp-minded village midwife, a "smiling Buddha" known as Auntie Suzy, who distilled arsenic from flypaper and distributed it to the women of Nagyr�ev. "Why are you bothering...

Chronologically recounting the story of history's silent assassin, Poison documents the gripping tales of the users and victims of these mysterious substances, from Cleopatra, the Borgias and Qin Shi Huang to contemporary secret service agents and terrorists. Profiles of the most commonly used toxins of each era reveal how the power-hungry, the dangerous and the desperate have harnessed these natural killers to achieve their ends. Poisoning is a dark...