V Is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death by Kathryn Harkup (Bloomsbury Sigma). Reviewed by Lawrence De Maria. “This is a book written for chemistry buffs — if there is such a thing — by an author who’s herself a former chemist. Harkup fills it with bacteria, acids, noxious flowers, toxins, and all sorts of other things that can kill you. Some of the substances require minimal doses to un-alive you quickly. Others work slowly, dragging out the homicide over time. The most pernicious may be the common substances — such as medicine-cabinet analgesics — that, when wielded improperly (and wildly inappropriately), can kill. Murderers especially enjoy them because nefariousness can be hard to detect; any resultant deaths are often passed off as a victim’s mistake or a suicide.”

Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It by Jane Leavy (Grand Central Publishing). Reviewed by Randy Cepuch. “Leavy makes a strong case that the advent of analytics — basing managerial decisions on detailed data rather than gut feelings — sapped the magic out of a game where it once seemed anything could happen. (Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball, detailing how the Oakland A’s used number-crunching to make the most of undervalued players, popularized the now-ubiquitous practice. Lewis is among those interviewed in Make Me Commissioner.)”

Sunburn: A Novel by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Melville House). Reviewed by Madeleine de Visé. “Amid Lucy’s stiflingly silent, love-starved family and Susannah’s neglected home, the pair stoke a relationship that burns bright enough to warm them through their final years of school. Torn between her mother’s fair-weather affection and Susannah’s half-baked dreams of escape, Lucy is confronted with her own desperation and hates herself as she makes the coward’s choice again and again.”

In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over the World by Matt Bobkin and Adam Feibel (House of Anansi Press). Reviewed by Michael Causey. “The book features well-written narratives chronicling the rise, fall, (sometimes) second rise, (sometimes) second fall, and general roller-coaster ride many of these bands went on as they encountered fickle fans, devious record executives, and the kind of inner turmoil one can only find on an episode of ‘Real Housewives of (fill in the city)’ or in a rock band.”

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp (Viking). Reviewed by William Schwartz. “As in that reporting, the book never quite gets all the way to a smoking gun. Instead, what Harp does is recount some of the many extremely implausible but true occurrences — including the day a soldier on a bad trip shot his best friend multiple times in what he claimed was self-defense — that were accepted at face value by corrupt authorities who ignored the much wider network of criminal activity and drug trafficking clearly at play.”

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