55. Three Hours, Rosamund Lupton
I had been avoiding this as I wasn't sure I wanted to read a tense thriller about a school shooting, but gave it a go on the back of many positive reviews on this thread.
I found this to be a more thoughtful and gentle book than I had expected, with less terror and a lot more comfort. One of Lupton's themes is the wonderful resilience and courage of teenagers - she puts them into a tough and scary situation but then focuses on all of the positive things that shine through in them. As a parent of teens, and having worked with them, this really resonated with me and captures what makes their age group so special.
The other well-handled themes concerned radicalisation and the experience of two unaccompanied child refugees. I thought the vast majority of what she did with Macbeth was really clever, using it as a shadow text throughout to show how people can be persuaded to do things, and become things, that would have horrified them before.
56. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou
In 2015 Carreyrou, writing for the Wall Street Journal, published a series of articles exposing fakery, lies and cover-up at the tech company Theranos. Theranos were a silicon valley "unicorn", a disruptive start up who had grown from nothing to a $10 billion valuation within a few years. The claim of their CEO (who was 19 when she founded the company) was that they had invented a small, sleek machine which could rapidly run a wide range of blood tests from a small finger-prick sample, making testing available to people in their local supermarket or drug store as well as in difficult situations such as war zones.
In actual fact, Theranos's machines didn't work. At the same time that they were confidently selling their vision, gaining funding from many investors and receiving huge positive media coverage, they were secretly using other companies' blood testing equipment to back up or fake results, as their own machines either gave wildly inaccurate readings or failed to work at all. Regulatory inspections were handled by having two labs set up: one which would pass the inspection and another (where the new tech lived) which inspectors didn't get to see.
The company operated in an atmopshere of extreme secrecy and paranoia, threatening any currect or ex-employees who tried to talk about their concerns. When they learned of Carreyrou's research, they leaned hard on him and on his sources to get the story dropped, but he had gathered enough evidence to publish, and that eventually led to a proper investigation after which the company was shut down.
This was fascinating. Carreyrou tells the story expertly, introducing a great cast of heroes and villains, explaining the more technical aspects in a way that makes sense and keeping sight of the main moral issue - that inaccurate blood tests would harm or kill people. Although he writes with panache, there's no doubt that his research has been meticulous (as it would have to be), and 30% of the book is given to notes backing up each point, each reported conversation, each piece of correspondence. At times this can make the book a bit fact-y - I would have liked to indulge in a bit more speculation as to how this happened, how Elizabeth Holmes (the CEO) persuaded so many established figures to invest in her business. But it was no less interesting for being factual - one of those books where you keep stopping to say "WTF?"