It’s the 1930s. Amarendra Chandra Pandey, the youngest son of an Indian prince, is about to board a train when a man bumps into him. Amarendra feels a prick; he then boards the train, worried about what it portends. Just over a week later, Amarendra is dead—of plague. India had not had a case of plague in a dozen years: Was Amarendra’s death natural, or premeditated—perhaps orchestrated by Benoy, his half-brother and competitor for the family riches?

Dan Morrison was researching the history of cholera in India when he came across a 1930s murder case that made headlines around the world at the time, but has since been forgotten, and found therein a story fit for a medical thriller. An Indian film in the 1970s was loosely based on the story, but even this fictional account could not compare to the theatrics of the true story. Morrison has written a new true crime book, The Poisoner of Bengal: The 1930s Murder That Shocked the World, that reads like a fictional thriller thought up by someone with a wild imagination. But it’s apparent from Morrison’s substantial bibliography and endnotes that all of the details in his book are in fact true.