This is exactly right.

This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised.

The poison is discretion is advised. The poisons are wonderfully devious chemical compounds.

They trick our bodies.

If you take an element like radio, it's structurally like calcium. So it literally the body takes radium and sends it to the bones where it wreaks all kinds of harm because it looks to the body like calcium. That was really what I was thinking about

when I first started thinking about this book.

The deviousness of chemical compounds

matched by the deviousness of poisers.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a non-fiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

I'm also the host of the Historical True Crime Podcast, Tenfold More Wicked on Exactly Right.

I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show.

I've interviewed some people in person and some from my home studio over Zoom.

And they are all excellent writers.

They've had so many great true crime stories

and now we want to tell you those stories

with details that have never been published.

Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make good and bad.

It's a deep dive into the stories behind the stories. Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and she's written a wonderful book called The Poisoners Handbook.

I read it when I was doing research for my true crime book American Sherlock because she is an expert at

using narrative journalism with science with murder. Deborah is the

director of the I started out in college as a chemistry major, I discovered very quickly that I didn't have the kind of attention span that you need to be safe in a laboratory to yourself or others.

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