The Royal Food Tasters' Union

Somebody always eats first.

For more than three thousand years, the most powerful people on earth have sat down to dinner and sent someone else to take the first bite. They never formed a union. They never signed a contract. They simply understood, without a word being said, that if the food was poisoned, they would pay.

The Royal Food Tasters' Union is a gripping narrative history of the people who stood between kings and the cup. It follows them from a Persian cupbearer afraid to look sad in front of his king, to a Roman slave carrying the dish that killed an emperor, to a Mughal kitchen where every dish was sealed with wax, to a coffee pot in a Korean palace, to a young woman in an East Prussian forest, waiting an hour to find out whether she would live.

Inside, you will discover:

• Why a boy of thirteen died at a Roman dinner even though his drink had been tasted
• How King Mithridates trained his body on poison, and what happened when he finally wanted to die
• Why Tudor England decided that poisoners should be boiled alive
• How a unicorn's horn, a goat's stomach stone and a silver spoon became the most expensive guesses in history
• Why tasting almost never worked, and what quietly worked instead
• How a nervous chemist and a silver stain on a piece of porcelain changed murder forever
• What a teapot in London in 2006 tells us about the future of fear

This is not a book of rumours. Every claim is weighed. Where the evidence is a record, a law or the account of a witness, you will be told. Where it is legend, you will be told that too, and sometimes allowed to enjoy it anyway.

It is also not a book about dusty kings. It is about the people nobody wrote down: the cooks, the cupbearers, the court ladies, the conscripts. The ones who ate first and were forgotten.

Written with the pace of a thriller and the care of a historian, this is a story you will finish in a single sitting and think about for a long time afterwards. You will never look at a dinner invitation, a glass of wine or a foil seal on a jar in quite the same way.

If you love narrative history, true stories from the secret lives behind the thrones, or the dark side of royal courts, pick up your fork.

The plate is waiting.