Molecules of Murder: Criminal Molecules and Classic Cases

mar this entertaining and well-written book, and they could easily be fixed by the time that the final version is released.

This book attempts to strike a healthy balance between informative and entertaining, perhaps attempting to hit that happy land that the Discovery channel does. Call it edutainment, if you will.

There is a lot of chemistry in here for those who are not interested. Stand warned. For those who have taken a few university courses, like intro chemistry and a basic one-semester organic chemistry course, there will not be anything new or difficult. For those without this experience, it will not be too significant to mar your appreciation for the rest of the book, so long as you are at least nominally interested.

The detective end is not quite as well-developed as the chemistry aspect, likely because the author is trained as a chemist and merely an amateur sleuth, or someone who likes crime stories. This detail in hand, it becomes much more obvious why the stories about the poisoners tend to be less florid and colorful than the chemical descriptions and the histories of the various compounds.

If you are okay with that, you will enjoy this book. If you are not really interested in chemistry, you picked the wrong book to read. This is really a targeted book, as you may guess from the fact that it is published by the Royal Society of Chemists (likely a British analog of the American Chemical Society).

One other remark about the book. Some information is strangely absent. For example, there is a mention of more details about cyanide manufacture in the glossary, but when I checked, it was absent. Other information is strangely present, as if the author has failed to foresee the possibility that some people may try to use this as a handbook of poisoning. Obviously, there is no information here that would not be easily acquired elsewhere. However, that doesn't mean that it should be presented so frankly and with so few warnings. Just a remark.

A fun read though. On the whole, it was quite good. It accomplished much of what it was intending, and a little better balance between the crime and science aspects, and I would have given it a fifth star.

Well done. B-

Harkius

This book is a collection of articles explaining the chemistry of various poisons used for murder. Emsley is an analytical chemist working in the UK who has been called on to assist with a number of investigations in which poisoning has been suspected. In this book, he examines ten compounds or elements that have been used for murder (ricin, hyoscine, atropine, diamorhine, adrenaline, chloroform, carbon monoxide, cyanide, paraquat, and polonium), explaining the chemistry of their toxicity, and reviewing how murders involving the substances were solved. He has divided the book into two parts, naturally occurring toxins and synthetic toxins. The book is intended for general audiences, so chemical terms are explained in an extensive glossary at the back of the book, and sources are provided in a list of "Further Reading," rather than interrupting the text with footnotes.

I found the book quite well written and straightforward to read. This is no murder mystery book, but rather very much a book about the chemistry of murder and forensics. For a chemistry book, though, Emsley does go into great detail about the lives and motives of the criminals who used the toxins that he describes. Although intended for general readers, parts of the text require at least a passing knowledge of general chemistry. Whereas Emsley has highlighted what he considers technical terms in the text and defined them in the glossary, he assumes that readers will at least have the background to understand terms like "covalently linked" and "ionically linked", as in "These drugs [Tagamet, Isoptin, and Celexa] are non-toxic due to the cyanide radical being covalently rather than ionically linked." Other such basic general chemistry terms and concepts are assumed rather than explained in the text or the glossary. Chemists, chemistry students, and others interested in forensic chemistry will find this book quite informative, as well as interesting.

This book is part science, part murder story. It discusses several famous murders, starting from the perspective of the poisons used to perpetrate them. It covers the chemical properties of the poison, and the plants or manufacturing process by which it is found or made. Then it covers a brief history of those involved in the famous murder cases. As such, it provides a historical set of practical use cases.

Since I am interested in science and history, this book provided a good combination of the two. For some, reading about poisoning deaths might be morbid, and for those who like murder mysteries, reading about science might be boring, but for me the combination was strong.

I was a little concerned that some of the research about the murders might not have been complete, in that his discussion of the Crippen murder painted a one sided picture, whereas the much lengthier book Thunderstruck brings in many more details and makes the murder more understandable in context and the motivations of the murderer more complex.

Regardless of this potential flaw, the book is quite worthwhile, and has certainly lead to some interesting cocktail conversations, albeit perhaps ones in which one might take a second look at what is in the cocktail.

I very much enjoyed this book, but as the author predicted, my enjoyment really didn't have much to do with Chemistry. I really wasn't that interested in the different molecules of various poisons. What I liked about the book was the history of the various poisons, many of them being known and used for thousands of years, the effects of each of them, the individual murders and attempted murders described in detail in this volume, the following investigations including the chemistry contributions and the trials and punishments of the murders. The single most important fact that I got from this book is that if one is planning to commit murder, don't do it with poison. Chemistry has been able to detect and prove some poisonings for hundreds of years. Very few people have gotten away with killing somebody with poison since Roman times. Today's chemistry can trace even the tiniest traces of poisons.
The various natural poisons discussed in this book that were used for murders had been known for millenniums and while deadly poisons in the wrong quantities, most of the same poisons could also be used as medical cures. The Greeks and Egyptians published books that listed hundreds of uses of these natural poisons. One such ancient Greek had 800 such cures.
One of the deadliest known natural poisons is Ricin, which is made from castor beans. Castor Oil has long been used as medicine. In its deadliest form, tiny amounts of it were used for political assassinations and as a weapon of Mass Destruction. Iraq is known to have used it in their war with Iran and quantities of it were discovered after the Americans Invaded Iraq. In World War I both sides tested it as a chemical weapon. Nazi's used a cup full castor oil as a Concentration Camp punishment.
The second types of poisons discussed in the book were the Man-made Chemicals such as Carbon Monoxide, which is responsible for thousands of accidental deaths as well as suicides. It has been a silent, accidental killer for more than 300 years when "the poisonous nature of the fumes given off from red-hot charcoal was mentioned by Hoffmann in his book, "Considerations of the Fatal Effects of the Vapour from Burning Charcoal, published in 1716."
Emsley discusses the molecular structure of these various poisons and how today's Forensic Toxicologists can easily identify poison victims with even the tiniest amount of tissue and sometimes even after the victim has been cremated. They get plenty of practice in their trade not looking for murderers, but in identifying accidental deaths and athletes using drugs to enhance their performances.
For those people who love the current crop of Forensic Scientists who regularly solve the crime and catch the bad guy television shows, this is a great read. I loved it even though I didn't really care for all the chemistry. However, the other two-thirds of the book were riveting. For those geeks with a much stronger interest in chemistry and science that information will only greatly increase the enjoyment of reading this tome. Once again, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I'd half expected to dislike it. I was pleasantly surprised and delighted as I'm certain many other readers will be.

Chemist and science writer John Elmsley brings chemistry to a general audience in "Molecules of Murder", which examines the crime of murder by poison from the viewpoint of the poison. The book is intended for readers of popular science and true crime, as it first presents the chemical and then infamous crimes in which it was used. Elmsley dedicates a chapter to each of five naturally occurring chemicals and five man-made: ricin, hycosine, atropine, morphine, adrenaline, chloroform, carbon monoxide, cyanide, paraquat, and polonium. The heroes of the stories are the forensic toxicologists, some of them pioneers, who were able to detect foul play in the untimely deaths of the victims.

Each chapter discusses the sources and properties of the poison, its toxicity, history of its criminal and medicinal uses, the effects of poisoning, and methods of detection before moving on to recount the famous case or cases in which it was used. The cases of murder or attempted murder by poison date from the 1880s to the 2000s and include murder for money, espionage, and for no particular reason. The story of Britain's "most prolific serial killer", Harold Shipman, who killed hundreds of his elderly patients with morphine, is there, as it the poisoning of Russian journalist Alexander Litvenenko with polonium just a couple of years ago. Bold-faced terms in the text are explained in more detail in the Glossary in the back of the book.

"Molecules of Murder" is fun and easy to read, though I suspect that fans of popular science will have more patience with the chemical details than aficionados of true crime. In noticed some errors in the details, which tend to betray a medical misunderstanding of the chemicals (e.g. codeine has no addictive properties, pseudoephedrine hydrochloride is an antihistamine). John Elmsley is a chemist, so I wouldn't expect him to have extensive knowledge of the clinical use of drugs, but he might have asked a medical practitioner or two to proofread. He also says that Congressman Leo Ryan and others were killed upon arriving at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. They were actually killed when leaving. Careless errors like that detracted slightly from my enjoyment but are not material to the book's purpose.