Books like Bad Blood

Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain traces three generations of the Sackler family, from their early pharmaceutical marketing innovations through the creation and aggressive promotion of OxyContin, the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic. Like Carreyrou, Keefe follows the money and the relationships that allowed a family to profit from mass suffering while maintaining a reputation as cultural philanthropists.

The reporting is exhaustive, drawing on lawsuits, internal documents, and interviews with former employees, and Keefe's writing has a controlled fury that builds as the body count rises. Where Bad Blood exposed a startup that faked its technology, Empire of Pain exposes a family that knew its product was addictive and pushed it anyway.

Both books share a structure that moves between the boardroom decisions and the human consequences, showing how insulation, legal teams, and public relations can delay accountability for decades. Readers who appreciated Carreyrou's ability to make corporate malfeasance feel personal will find Keefe does the same on a larger scale.

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's The Smartest Guys in the Room documents the rise and collapse of Enron, the energy company whose executives manipulated markets, fabricated profits, and destroyed billions in shareholder value before the fraud was uncovered. Like Theranos, Enron had a charismatic leadership team that created a culture of intimidation where questioning the numbers was treated as disloyalty.

The reporting draws on extensive interviews with former executives, traders, and board members, reconstructing how a legitimate business gradually became a criminal enterprise. The writing moves between the mechanics of the fraud and the personalities driving it, with particularly sharp portraits of CEO Jeff Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow.

Where Bad Blood is the story of a company that never had a working product, Enron is the story of a company that had a working business but chose crime over honest accounting. Readers who want to understand how corporate cultures become corrupt will find this book provides one of the most detailed available case studies.

Tom Wright and Bradley Hope's Billion Dollar Whale tells the story of Jho Low, a Malaysian financier who orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, stealing billions from Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund and spending the money on Hollywood movies, yachts, and parties with celebrities. The scale of the theft is staggering, and the authors reconstruct how Low used a web of shell companies, corrupt bankers, and compliant regulators to move money across borders while maintaining the image of a legitimate businessman.

Like Bad Blood, the book reads more like a crime novel than financial journalism, with each chapter revealing a new layer of the scheme. The reporting draws on government investigations across multiple countries, leaked documents, and interviews with people on both sides of the fraud.

Where Carreyrou focused on a single company in Silicon Valley, Wright and Hope follow a global trail through Malaysia, Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, and Hollywood. Readers who liked Bad Blood's narrative pace will find Billion Dollar Whale moves even faster.

Michael Lewis's The Big Short follows the handful of investors who recognized that the U.S. housing market was a bubble built on fraudulent mortgage lending and bet against it before the 2008 financial crisis.

Lewis is a more literary writer than Carreyrou, and he structures the book around character portraits of the contrarians who saw what the banks, rating agencies, and regulators refused to see. The parallels to Bad Blood are structural: both books are about systems where incentives are misaligned, where the people raising alarms are dismissed or punished, and where the eventual collapse validates the critics. Lewis excels at explaining complex financial instruments through the stories of the people trading them, making subprime CDOs and credit default swaps comprehensible to general readers.

The tone alternates between dark comedy and outrage, capturing both the absurdity of the financial system and the real human cost when it collapsed. For readers who want another account of institutional failure where the warning signs were visible to anyone willing to look, The Big Short delivers.

Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks examines a different kind of institutional failure: the medical establishment's use of a Black woman's cancer cells without her knowledge or consent, and the decades-long impact on her family. While the subject matter is scientific rather than corporate, the book shares Bad Blood's concern with power imbalances, institutional secrecy, and the human cost of treating people as means to an end.

Skloot spent ten years reporting the story, building relationships with the Lacks family and tracing the history of HeLa cells through laboratories around the world. Her writing weaves three narratives, the science of the cells, the biography of Henrietta, and the ongoing struggle of her family, into a single account that is simultaneously a science book, a social history, and a family story.

Readers who appreciated how Carreyrou centered the human stakes of Theranos' fraud will find Skloot does similar work, showing how the medical system's failures are not abstract but personal.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics might seem like an unusual pairing with Bad Blood, but the two books share a core principle: incentives explain behavior better than intentions do. Freakonomics examines how misaligned incentives produce cheating among schoolteachers, corruption among sumo wrestlers, and irrational choices among drug dealers, using economic analysis to expose the hidden structures beneath surface-level explanations.

The connection to Bad Blood is about understanding why fraud happens. Carreyrou documents the specific lies Theranos told; Levitt and Dubner provide the analytical framework for understanding why those lies were so easy to sustain.

When investors are incentivized to believe, regulators are incentivized to defer, and employees are incentivized to stay silent, fraud becomes not an aberration but a predictable outcome of the system's design. The writing is playful and provocative, built around surprising data rather than investigative reporting, but it sharpens the same skills of skepticism that Carreyrou's work demands.