A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BEST BOOKS OF 2022 A former United Church minister massacres his family. What led to this act of femicide, and why were his victims forgotten? On May 2, 1963, Robert Killins, a former United Church minister, slaughtered every woman in his family but one. She (and her brother) lived to tell the story of what motivated a talented man who had been widely admired, a scholar and graduate from Queen's University, to stalk and terrorize the women in his family for almost twenty years and then murder them. Through extensive oral histories, Cook and Carson painstakingly trace the causes of a femicide in which four women and two unborn babies were murdered over the course of one bloody evening. While they situate this murderous rampage in the literature on domestic abuse and mass murders, they also explore how the two traumatized child survivors found their way back to health and happiness. Told through vivid first-person accounts, this family memoir explores how a murderer was created.

José Tomas de Cuéllar was a Mexican writer noted for his delicate sense of humour and gift for caricature. La Noche Buena and Baile Y Cochino are two novellas written in the costumbrista style made popular by the periodical press in which these sketches of contemporary manners were first published. La Noche Buena describes middle class life in which people pursue pleasure and entertainment without regard to Catholic morality. Baile Y Cochino depicts Mexican women and their dedication to fashion. It is through them that the novelist examines a scoiety that is susceptible to foreign values, the importation of which radically altered the face of Mexico and its traditional customs.