The End of Her

Who was behind the brutal murder of my great-grandmother? wondered Wayne Hoffman, a New York City-based journalist and novelist. The crime wasn't just a family legend-it made headlines across Canada in 1913-but her killer had never been found. In The End of Her, Hoffman meticulously researches this century-old tragedy, while facing another: his mother's decline from Alzheimer's. Weaving back and forth between past and present, Hoffman invokes in dramatic detail the life and death of his immigrant great-grandmother in Winnipeg, and his mother's downward spiral. In the process, he discovers an extended family that has been scattered across thousands of miles for a hundred years.

"Journalist Hoffman (Hard and two other novels) makes his nonfiction debut with a riveting account of his dual efforts to care for his aging mother and crack a century-old unsolved murder…Hoffman makes the details of his dogged research vivid…and his conclusions about…