The End of Her: Racing Against Alzheimer’s to Solve a Murder by Wayne Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a deeply affecting work. I sank slowly into the literary seduction constructed here. There are so many layers – the horrifying and emotional toll of Alzheimer’s on an individual and on a family, still balanced with humor and love. The mysterious conundrum of an unlikely murder in a small pioneer town. The underlays of Jewish culture and Old West history (Canadian Prairie and Canadian Old West?) which color and inform the two major threads.

Unsolved Murder

I wondered if the story of someone else’s family past would be of interest to me. Especially since the unsolved murder happened so long ago–but it was. Wayne Hoffman paints a vivid picture of these places from the early 1900s – Winnipeg, Canora (Saskatchewan) – and the people who lived there, the immigrants to whom he’s related and their fellow citizens, whether they were Polish housekeepers, illiterate laborers, befuddled cops or others. Through what must have been painstaking research, we get a sense of how lives were recorded there. Even more importantly for this story, how crimes were investigated (or not investigated) with the “primitive” tools law enforcement had at their disposal back then.

Alzheimer’s Disease

There’s lots and lots of names and relatives. Bravo for the increasingly complicated family tree graphics that start chapters. Most of all though, reading a son’s account of how his mother loses him as he also loses her due to the disease course of Alzheimer’s is just devastating to read, while also being detailed and unsparing. There’s just something about non-fiction as a genre that a writer can have a profound intimacy with, particularly when the subjects mean so much, as they obviously do here. Highly recommended.

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