From One Poisoner to Twelve!
When I finished writing Fatal Lunch, I thought I was done with poisoners.
The Erin Patterson case had consumed the better part of a year. One case, one afternoon, one meal - and an extraordinary amount of forensic, legal, and circumstantial detail to untangle. By the time I'd finished, I knew more about death cap mushrooms than any reasonable person should, and I was ready to move on to something different.
That lasted about a week.
The problem with researching one poisoner is that you inevitably stumble across others. And once you start pulling at those threads, you can't stop. A footnote leads to a case from the 1950s. That case leads to a journal article from the 1890s. That article leads to a poison you've never heard of, and suddenly it's one in the morning and you're reading about aconite - a plant so toxic it was named after the saliva of the three-headed dog that guarded the underworld!
That's how my second book was born. Not with a firm plan, but with a question I couldn't put down: what kind of person poisons someone who trusts them?
It's a different kind of crime. There's no confrontation, no weapon in the conventional sense, no moment of physical violence. What there is, every single time, is proximity. A shared meal. A cup of tea. A vitamin. A cocktail made to celebrate good news. Poisoners don't break in. They're already inside. They're already trusted. That's what makes these cases so unsettling - and, if I'm honest, so compelling to research.
The new book is called True Crime Verdict Files: Volume 1 - 12 Disturbing True Crime Stories of Murder by Poison. it's the first book in what will be a solid anthology series. This first book will cover twelve cases, spanning 134 years, four countries, and seven different poisons. Some of the names you'll recognise. Others have been almost entirely forgotten - buried in old newspaper archives and court records that took some serious digging to find.
This book sent me across centuries and continents. I've spent time in digitised newspaper archives from Victorian London, coronial records from 1950s Sydney, and glued to Court TV watching a case that only wrapped up earlier this year. Some of the older cases have gaps - records that were lost, bodies that were cremated before anyone thought to test them, details that conflict depending on who was writing and when. I've been transparent about that in the book. Where sources disagreed, I went with the legal record. Where the evidence is silent, I've left it silent.
But the thing that struck me most wasn't the research challenge. It was the pattern. These cases are separated by decades, by geography, by motive, by method - and yet the architecture is almost always the same. Someone prepares food or drink for someone who loves them. The victim consumes it without suspicion. The symptoms are mistaken for illness. And the person responsible is quite often the one standing by the bedside, looking concerned.
I wrote about that pattern at the end of the Caroline Grills chapter - a woman who poisoned her relatives with thallium in 1950s Sydney — and found myself drawing a direct line to Erin Patterson, the death cap mushroom murderer, seventy years later. Different poison. Different era. Same kitchen. Same betrayal. It felt like the book had come full circle, back to where Fatal Lunch began.
True Crime Verdict Files: Volume 1 is coming soon - I'll share the release date as soon as it's locked in. It's the first volume in the series, with more to follow.
If you'd like to know when it drops, I send occasional updates to my mailing list - no spam, no clutter, just the work. You'll also get a free bonus chapter: a fully researched thirteenth poisoner case that didn't make it into the book.
Sign up here: www.cherylwarrenauthor.com/bonus
Thanks for reading. And thanks, as always, for the support you've given Fatal Lunch. It means more than you know.
Cheryl
