The Poisoner’s Handbook

Fans of television’s “CSI” and its myriad spin-offs will no doubt find much of morbid interest in Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, a lushly detailed account of how the discipline and profession of forensic science emerged from the “poison playground” of 1920s New York to become an indispensable argumentative tool in the modern-day crime-fighter’s arsenal.…