READING LIST · LISANNE SWART
Books Like Bad Blood
Bad Blood is not really a book about blood tests. It is a book about belief — about how completely a charismatic person can make the people around them see something that is not there. Elizabeth Holmes did not just fool investors and board members. She fooled herself, which is perhaps the more disturbing part. John Carreyrou spent years unpicking the lie, at great personal and professional cost, and the result is one of the best-reported nonfiction books of the last decade. It reads like a thriller. Everything in it is true. These twelve books live in the same territory — stories of fraud, exposure, and the particular kind of courage it takes to keep pulling on a thread when everyone is telling you to stop.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Investigative Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
All 12 books at a glance- Empire of Pain — Patrick Radden Keefe, 2021
- Catch and Kill — Ronan Farrow, 2019
- The Smartest Guys in the Room — McLean & Elkind, 2003
- Billion Dollar Whale — Wright & Hope, 2018
- The Cult of We — Brown & Farrell, 2021
- Super Pumped — Mike Isaac, 2019
- The Big Short — Michael Lewis, 2010
- The Confidence Game — Maria Konnikova, 2016
- Going Clear — Lawrence Wright, 2013
- American Kingpin — Nick Bilton, 2017
- Say Nothing — Patrick Radden Keefe, 2018
- The Dropout — Rebecca Jarvis, 2019
How these books compare to Bad Blood
| Book | Focus | Tempo | Best if you loved… |
|---|
| Empire of Pain | Corporate dynasty & opioid crisis | Slow-build, epic | The moral weight of it |
| Catch and Kill | Investigative journalism process | Thriller pace | The reporter’s jeopardy |
| The Smartest Guys in the Room | Enron accounting fraud | Dense, rewarding | The mechanics of the lie |
| Billion Dollar Whale | Financial fraud across continents | Fast, globe-trotting | The audacity of the scale |
| The Cult of We | WeWork / Silicon Valley delusion | Propulsive | The charismatic founder dynamic |
| Super Pumped | Uber / toxic company culture | Fast, reported | Silicon Valley’s broken ethics |
| The Big Short | 2008 financial crisis | Funny, sharp | Nobody asking the obvious question |
| The Confidence Game | Psychology of con artists | Essayistic, absorbing | Why people believed Holmes |
| Going Clear | Scientology and institutional opacity | Dense, forensic | Organisations built on secrecy |
| American Kingpin | Silk Road / dark web fraud | Thriller pace | The idealist who crossed every line |
| Say Nothing | Northern Ireland / IRA violence | Literary, patient | Keefe’s narrative journalism at its best |
| The Dropout | Elizabeth Holmes’s psychology | Accessible, focused | Understanding what Holmes was thinking |
01
NonfictionCorporate scandalEmpire of Pain
Patrick Radden Keefe · 2021
The Sackler family built one of the great American fortunes through philanthropy — their name is on museum wings and university halls across the world. Keefe’s book traces how that fortune was built on OxyContin, the opioid that sparked a national addiction crisis, and how the family used every legal and PR tool available to avoid accountability for decades. It is a masterclass in investigative narrative nonfiction.
If Bad Blood made you angry about how power protects itself, Empire of Pain will make you angrier. Keefe has the same gift Carreyrou has: he makes corporate malfeasance feel urgent and personal without losing the rigour of the reporting. The Sackler story is longer, more multigenerational, and in some ways more chilling than Theranos — because the harm here is counted in hundreds of thousands of lives.
02
NonfictionBusinessThe Smartest Guys in the Room
Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind · 2003
Before Theranos, there was Enron. McLean and Elkind’s account of the energy company’s collapse is the template for the corporate fraud book that Bad Blood perfected. Enron was the biggest bankruptcy in American history at the time, built on accounting fraud so elaborate that almost no one on the inside fully understood it. This is the book that established the genre.
McLean was the Fortune journalist who first asked publicly whether Enron was overvalued — a question so obvious in retrospect that it is frightening she was the only one asking it. That dynamic — the emperor with no clothes, and the single journalist who says so — is exactly what Carreyrou recreated with Theranos. Read The Smartest Guys in the Room to understand where Bad Blood comes from.
03
NonfictionFinanceBillion Dollar Whale
Tom Wright and Bradley Hope · 2018
Jho Low was a young Malaysian socialite who somehow became a central figure in one of the largest financial frauds ever committed. He stole roughly $4.5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund — and spent it on superyachts, Hollywood films, and parties for celebrities who had no idea where the money came from. Wright and Hope reconstructed the whole thing from financial records and interviews across a dozen countries.
Where Elizabeth Holmes built her fraud on the promise of a technology that would save lives, Jho Low built his on pure financial complexity — the kind that relies on nobody actually checking. Both books are fundamentally about the same thing: what happens when oversight fails and someone decides to take everything they can reach.
04
NonfictionSilicon ValleyThe Cult of We
Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell · 2021
Adam Neumann took a company that rented desks and persuaded SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to value it at $47 billion. The pitch was that WeWork was not a real estate business but a community movement — and for a few extraordinary years, almost everyone in venture capital agreed. Brown and Farrell are Wall Street Journal reporters who spent years reconstructing how the delusion held together, and what happened when it did not.
The parallel to Theranos is almost uncomfortably direct. Neumann, like Holmes, built a company on a vision that the underlying product could not support. The charismatic founder, the complicit investors, the employees who believed, the collapse — it is the same structure. This book comes out of the same journalistic tradition as Carreyrou’s work, and it reads with the same controlled outrage.
05
NonfictionInvestigative journalismCatch and Kill
Ronan Farrow · 2019
When Farrow started investigating Harvey Weinstein, his own employer tried to kill the story. NBC pulled the plug. His sources were surveilled. He was warned off by lawyers. He published anyway — first in the New Yorker, then in this book, which tells the full story of how he reported it and what it cost him. It is simultaneously a journalism memoir, a thriller, and an account of how institutions protect predators.
Bad Blood and Catch and Kill are companion books about the same phenomenon: powerful people using money and legal threats to suppress truth. Carreyrou was threatened by Theranos lawyers throughout his reporting. Farrow had his own network working against him. Both books are really about what investigative journalism requires — and why so much of it never happens.
06
NonfictionInvestigative journalismGoing Clear
Lawrence Wright · 2013
Wright spent years investigating Scientology — its origins, its theology, its internal culture, and the methods it uses to control members and suppress criticism. The result is one of the most rigorously reported accounts of an institution that does not want to be reported on. Wright interviewed more than 200 current and former members. The Church fought the book at every stage.
The connection to Bad Blood is institutional resistance to scrutiny — Theranos used lawyers and NDAs the way Scientology uses its own apparatus. Both books are about organisations that have made opacity a survival strategy, and the particular difficulty of reporting on them from the outside.
07
NonfictionFinanceThe Big Short
Michael Lewis · 2010
A handful of traders figured out that the American housing market was a fraud in 2005 — years before anyone else. Lewis follows them through the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, explaining through their stories how it was possible for an entire system to be built on securities that nobody had properly looked at. It is funny, which seems impossible given the subject matter, and it explains complex financial instruments more clearly than most textbooks.
Bad Blood takes place inside Silicon Valley culture: the fake-it-till-you-make-it mythology, the reverence for founders, the disinclination to ask basic questions of people who seem to believe in themselves sufficiently. The Big Short shows the same failure of scepticism in finance, five years earlier. Both books ask: why does nobody ask the obvious question? The answers are uncomfortably similar.
08
NonfictionSilicon ValleySuper Pumped
Mike Isaac · 2019
Mike Isaac spent years covering Uber for the New York Times before writing this account of Travis Kalanick’s rise and fall. Kalanick built Uber into one of the most valuable companies in the world by treating laws, competitors, and employees as obstacles to be removed. The culture he created was the product as much as the app was. Isaac had better access than almost any reporter to what was happening inside.
Bad Blood and Super Pumped are books about what happens when you build a company where the founder’s belief in the mission is treated as moral justification for anything. Holmes believed she was saving lives. Kalanick believed he was changing transportation. Both used that belief to override every check that might have stopped them earlier. The institutional failure in each case is the same.
09
NonfictionPsychologyThe Confidence Game
Maria Konnikova · 2016
Konnikova is a psychologist and journalist who wanted to understand why con artists work — not how, but why. The answer is not that their victims are stupid. It is that they are human, which is a different thing entirely. She traces the anatomy of a con from the psychological literature and from dozens of real cases, and the result is the clearest explanation yet produced of the question Bad Blood keeps raising: why did so many intelligent people believe Elizabeth Holmes?
Read this alongside Bad Blood rather than after it. Carreyrou documents the fraud. Konnikova explains why it was possible. The combination is more illuminating than either book alone — and the implications reach well beyond Theranos into every institution, boardroom, and relationship where someone decided to believe what they wanted to believe.
10
NonfictionCriminal fraudAmerican Kingpin
Nick Bilton · 2017
Ross Ulbricht built Silk Road — the dark web marketplace where you could buy anything — from his laptop, alone, convinced he was a libertarian pioneer. Nick Bilton reconstructed how he did it, what he became in the process, and how the FBI eventually dismantled it. It is a different kind of fraud from Theranos: there was no fake technology and no board of distinguished advisers. But the underlying story is the same — a young idealist who believed the rules did not apply to him.
American Kingpin is the book on this list that reads most like a thriller in the classical sense. It moves fast, and the tension is real. But the question underneath it is the same one Carreyrou asks: how does someone convince themselves that what they are doing is justified — and what happens when the people keeping score disagree?
11
NonfictionInvestigative journalismSay Nothing
Patrick Radden Keefe · 2018
Say Nothing is not a corporate fraud book. It is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and specifically about the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was taken from her home and murdered by the IRA. Keefe uses her story as the thread through which he traces the full arc of the conflict — and the silence that followed it.
I include it here because Keefe is doing something in this book that Carreyrou also does at his best: he makes a very large and complicated history feel intimate by following specific individuals through it. The moral questions are different — this is not about corporate greed but about political violence and the stories communities tell themselves afterwards. But the quality of the reporting, and the way it reads like a novel without sacrificing an ounce of accuracy, puts it in the same class as Bad Blood.
12
NonfictionBusinessThe Dropout
Rebecca Jarvis · 2019
Based on the ABC News podcast of the same name, The Dropout focuses specifically on Elizabeth Holmes herself — her background, her psychology, and the specific way she constructed her public persona. Where Bad Blood is a reporter’s account of the fraud as a story unfolding in real time, The Dropout is more interested in the woman at the centre of it.
Read this after Bad Blood rather than instead of it. Carreyrou’s book is irreplaceable as a piece of reporting. But Jarvis asks the question that Bad Blood deliberately sidesteps — what was actually going on inside Holmes’s head? — and gets closer to an answer than you might expect. Together, the two books give you a more complete picture of Theranos than either does alone.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book most similar to Bad Blood in quality and ambition
→ Start with Empire of Pain. Keefe is the closest thing to Carreyrou working today, and this is his best book. It will consume you in the same way.
If you want to understand the genre Bad Blood belongs to
→ Read The Smartest Guys in the Room. It is the original corporate fraud book — the one that established the template. Bad Blood knew this book.
If you want to understand why people believed Holmes in the first place
→ Read The Confidence Game. Konnikova does not write about Theranos specifically, but she explains every single thing that made it possible.
If you want something that goes wider — beyond business fraud, into what investigative journalism actually costs
→ Read Catch and Kill. Farrow’s account of what it took to publish the Weinstein story is the best inside account of the reporting process since All the President’s Men.
If you want the most direct Silicon Valley parallel to Bad Blood
→ Read The Cult of We. WeWork is the Theranos story told one company later, with all the same patterns repeating in full view.
Frequently asked questions about books like Bad Blood
What is Bad Blood by John Carreyrou about?
Bad Blood is an investigative nonfiction book about Theranos, the Silicon Valley startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed to have revolutionized blood testing. It turned out to be one of the greatest frauds in the history of Silicon Valley. John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the story, traces how Holmes built a multibillion-dollar company on a lie, how whistleblowers were silenced, and how the fraud finally unravelled.
Is Bad Blood a true story?
Yes, entirely. John Carreyrou is an investigative journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who spent years reporting on Theranos for the Wall Street Journal. Elizabeth Holmes was later convicted of fraud and is currently serving her prison sentence. The book is one of the most rigorously reported pieces of business journalism published in recent years.
What genre is Bad Blood?
Bad Blood sits at the intersection of investigative journalism, narrative nonfiction, and business writing. It reads like a thriller but every detail is documented and sourced. If you enjoy it, you are likely to enjoy other books in the corporate scandal and investigative nonfiction space, such as Empire of Pain, Catch and Kill, and The Smartest Guys in the Room.
What makes Bad Blood different from other corporate scandal books?
Most corporate scandal books are written after the fact, often by people reconstructing events from court records. Bad Blood is written by the journalist who actually broke the story in real time, against enormous legal pressure and resistance from one of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley. The narrative tension is real because Carreyrou was genuinely at risk throughout the reporting process. That quality of lived-in jeopardy is very rare.
What is the best book to read after Bad Blood?
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe is the most natural next book. Keefe is doing the same kind of long-form investigative nonfiction as Carreyrou, with the same rigour and the same ability to make corporate wrongdoing feel urgent and personal. If you want something that explains Bad Blood psychologically rather than narratively, The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova is the other essential companion.
Are there books like Bad Blood about Silicon Valley specifically?
Yes. The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell covers the WeWork collapse and is probably the closest structural parallel to Bad Blood in recent years — a charismatic founder, an inflated valuation, and the same questions about why investors and journalists did not ask the obvious questions earlier. Super Pumped by Mike Isaac covers Uber and Travis Kalanick, which is a different kind of Silicon Valley failure — more about toxic culture than outright fraud — but belongs in the same conversation.
Who should read books like Bad Blood?
Anyone who finished Bad Blood and immediately wanted more. These are books for readers who are drawn to the mechanics of how deception works at scale, how smart people convince themselves and others that a lie is the truth, and how a handful of determined individuals can bring an entire system down. You do not need to be interested in business or finance. The human drama is the point.
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“It’s not enough to do good. You also have to do it in a way that will make the news.” — John Carreyrou
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