The Widow Maker

Six hundred dead husbands. One "undetectable" poison. And a woman whose legend may be deadlier than anything history can prove.

Seventeenth-century Rome feared a clear, tasteless liquid said to turn unhappy wives into widows. Its name was Aqua Tofana, and at the center of its legend stood Giulia Tofana: poison maker, criminal mastermind, protector of abused women, and supposed architect of hundreds of deaths.

But the surviving records tell a far stranger story.

In The Widow Maker, Evelyn St. James follows the poison from private rooms and secret transactions to the sensational Spana investigation and the gallows of Campo de' Fiori. Along the way, she separates documented murder from rumor, reconstructs the women who actually carried the trade, and exposes how four centuries transformed a shadowy historical figure into a true-crime icon.

Witty, vivid, and grounded in archival scholarship, this is the story behind one of history's most notorious poisons-and the scandal that refused to die.