This month’s books all feature women making bad decisions — about themselves, about other people and about how to confront the threats swirling around them. Let’s begin with Detective Elise Sutton, the forensics expert thrust into a bewildering crisis in Wendy Walker’s WHAT REMAINS (Blackstone, 293 pp., $27.99). Shopping for towels at a local megastore, Elise is startled by a shooter firing into the crowd. “I am suddenly aware that, after 12 years in the department, this is the first time I have drawn my weapon in the outside world,” she thinks. And then, just as the gunman points his weapon at a bystander, she shoots him dead.

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Persons: Let’s, Elise Sutton, Wendy Walker’s, Elise