Bad Blood gave me a reading hangover. I stayed up much too late reading it because it hooked me from the first page.

From the Publisher’s Summary

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

This may be the first time I’ve made this statement: Bad Blood is a practically perfect read. From the first page, I was sucked into the story. It’s told in such a matter of fact way, but you can feel the tension that would have been a part of the Theranos environment. The book does a few things very well. It portrays ordinary people who become extraordinary characters. Carreyrou hardly needs help creating villains of Holmes and Balwani, the leaders of Theranos. Their poor ethics, potentially sociopathic personalities, and general demeanor perfectly illustrate who they are. On the flip side, what you don’t see in the book is the evident charm Holmes could turn on when she needed to.

Bad Blood also highlights our tendency to seek out heroes and sometimes give them far too much leeway. I freely admit I know very little about the Venture Capital world. But Bad Blood left me questioning exactly how much goes into due diligence versus greed and the potential to make money. With investors like Larry Ellison, and board members like General Mattis, George Schultz, and Sam Nunn, I find it hard to believe that so many people were willing to accept excuse after excuse and not ask more difficult questions when Holmes continually failed to deliver, and despite people providing compelling circumstantial evidence that the emperor wore no clothes. The tech media isn’t blameless, either. Everyone was eager to champion Elizabeth Holmes – young, charismatic, and the first woman to become a self-made billionaire. Of course it makes for great press. But in the beginning, most journalists stopped at the surface and didn’t ask the challenging questions.

The mark of a good book is that it leaves you lingering over certain ideas. In Bad Blood, it’s ethics. What do you do when your personal integrity clashes with the reality you’re seeing? The real heroes of this story are the ones who dared to question. Who dared to ignore their non-disclosure agreements. Who faced intimidation head-on and didn’t back down. Who valued ethics more than money. Who couldn’t stay silent when lives could be at risk. And while the individuals who exposed Theranos are the champions, Carreyrou and The Wall Street Journal must also be celebrated for telling the story and not backing down in the face of intimidation campaigns.

Bad Blood is unequivocally a must-read. I could not put it down and have recommended it to everyone I know. The question of ethics has stayed with me since I finished the book. I don’t know if that is an intended impact but I think it is an important takeaway. It’s a study in human behavior. Clearly Holmes and Balwani were comfortable enough with their greed and ambition to lie, intimidate, and threaten people as a means to their ends. But they are also facing the consequences of those choices.