While most of the women poisoners discussed in The League of Lady Poisoners are murderers, they are too complex to fit in one box. Some poisoned for power, like Wu Zetian, a Chinese woman in the seventh century who rose from a lowly palace concubine to eventually rule over all of China. Others made their profession out of poison, like Locusta, a poison expert and assassin in first-century Rome, and Guilia Tofana, who lived and sold poison in seventeenth-century Italy. Others killed because they felt trapped or in impossible situations. And, yes, some killed for love, like Nannie Doss, known as the Giggling Granny or the Lonely Hearts Killer. Nannie Doss sought husbands in the Lonely Hearts pages but killed them with arsenic when they weren’t the Prince Charming she wanted.