I don’t frequently read fast-paced novels. Although these are hardly the kinds of novels that would keep most people glued to their chairs, I frequently find myself unable to put a book down. However, I just discovered that I was unable to put a book down once I started reading it.

The emergence and demise of Theranos are covered in John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Here is a summary of the Theranos saga in case you are unfamiliar with it: the business made a promise to provide you with an accurate assessment of your health in a short amount of time using only a small bit of blood. Theranos was founded by Elizabeth Holmes when she was just 19 years old, and both of them soon rose to prominence in Silicon Valley. She was on the covers of Forbes and Fortune and gave incredibly well-known TED presentations.

Theranos was valued at around $10 billion in 2013 and even collaborated with Walgreens to distribute their blood testing in retail locations across the nation. The issue? Their technology was useless. It was never even close to succeeding. However, Holmes was so skilled at persuading people to adopt her viewpoint that she wasn’t stopped until after actual patients had used the company’s “tests” to decide how to manage their health. Theranos was formally shut down in August, and she and her former business partner are now potentially facing jail time for fraud.

Up until Carreyrou broke the news as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, the public was unaware of Theranos’ fraud. He was so crucial to the company’s destruction that Bad Blood provides a fascinating inside look.

For want of a better term, some of the information he provides is ridiculous. To test their blood on a Theranos device, Holmes would invite potential investors to the lab. Instead of displaying an error notice, the device had been designed to display a very sluggish progress metre. When the results weren’t available right away, Holmes sent the investors home with a promise to get back to them.

An employee would take the blood sample out of the apparatus as soon as they left and transfer it to a professional blood analyzer. Without their knowledge, her investors had their blood tested using equipment that could be found in any lab in the nation.

Silicon Valley has a lot to gain from the Theranos debacle. A business must have relevant professionals on its board of directors to get started. Several former Cabinet secretaries and senators made up the Theranos board, but none of them had any background in diagnostics during the majority of the company’s existence. If they had, they could have seen the warning signs far earlier.

Because human lives are at stake, health technology demands a different approach than other categories of technology. Carreyrou devotes a lot of his writing to Holmes’ idolization of Steve Jobs and his intransigence in pursuing his goals. That strategy is acceptable for consumer electronics because no one is harmed if a new phone doesn’t perform as promised, but it is reckless for a health company. People suffered as a result of Holmes’ efforts to promote a vision of what Theranos could be rather than what it actually was.

Bad Blood serves as a warning against the benefits of fame. Holmes appeared to be everything Silicon Valley looks for in a CEO: charming, convincing, and with a compelling life narrative fit for magazine features. Nothing improper about that in and of itself. A startup can benefit greatly from having a rock star CEO. But you can’t let fame overtake everything else.

Theranos is the worst-case scenario of what may happen when a CEO puts her own legacy above everything else, but I hope that it won’t be used as a justification to dismiss the next young lady with a great concept. Furthermore, I don’t want Bad Blood to turn people off of next-generation diagnostics. Theranos went above and beyond to avoid meeting quality norms. New diagnostics are put through extensive testing, and the business is heavily regulated.

Although Bad Blood addresses several important moral issues, it is ultimately a suspenseful thriller with a devastating conclusion. It’s an entertaining book chock with odd tidbits that will make you gasp aloud. At times, the narrative seems too absurd to be true (no wonder Hollywood is already planning to turn it into a movie). It seems like the ideal book to curl up with by the fire this monsoon.