In Instruments of Murder, his twenty-sixth book, the inimitable Max Haines describes more than fifty shocking crimes from around the world—many committed with the least likely of instruments.

The stories include that of fifty-three-year-old Styllou Christofi of Cyprus, who was furious with her son Stavros for moving to England in 1937 and starting a family with a German named Hella—the ultimate betrayal of family and homeland. One night, while Stavros was at work and the two women were at home cleaning the kitchen, the older woman struck her daughter-in-law on the back of the head with a metal plate, rendering her unconscious. Using a scarf belonging to one of the grandchildren, Styllou strangled Hella and burned the body in a backyard bonfire.

Haines also recounts the notorious case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who during the early 1990s drugged all seventeen of his male victims, cut up their bodies, and kept body parts as mementos in his refrigerator.

Whether it's murder by rattlesnake, poison, umbrella, or strangulation, these tales of murder will surprise and unsettle you, but each satisfyingly ends with a perpetrator brought to justice.

Max Haines’s “Crime Flashback” column made its debut in the Toronto Sun in 1972. Since that time, he has researched more than two thousand murder cases from around the world. Today, “Crime Flashback” appears weekly in the Toronto Sun and is syndicated around the world and in more than forty newspapers across Canada. The column has a weekly readership of more than three million and has been translated into Spanish, French and Chinese. Haines is also the author of twenty-five bestselling anthologies of crime vignettes, including Unnatural Causes, Canadian Crimes, Murder Most Foul and The Collected Works of Max Haines: Volume Four. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Marilyn.

Max Haines' profile page