Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Elizabeth Holmes's company, Theranos, promised its machines would be able to use just a single drop of blood to test for a whole swath of health conditions and diseases—a technology that would revolutionize diagnostic science. The company went through multiple enormous rounds of funding, brooked partnerships with Safeway and Walgreens, and boasted a board full of big names like George Shultz and Henry Kissinger. Only problem: The technology never worked.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou first broke the story of this very 21st-century confidence game in 2015, and Bad Blood is his in-depth followup. Carreyrou's prose is brisk and well-structured; equally propulsive are the details on Holmes's personal idiosyncrasies, Theranos' bizarre lab standards and methods of secrecy, and the way powerful people turned a blind eye to discrepancies again and again.

It's an unbelievable read—as in, literally, very difficult to believe—but all the more compelling for it.