Mother's Day

"Theresa Cross was a toxic mother, but the maternity myth blinded, deafened, and silenced those that might have stopped her." Dennis McDougal, with his flair for storytelling and his eye for vivid detail, is one of the best of true crime writers. In this book he profiles a very dark character indeed: a woman for whom neither her life nor her fantasies ever got beyond her sad, narrow world of severe men, twisted religious ideas, beatings, sexual jealousy, horror fiction and movies, and obsessive housecleaning. She had several husbands, one of whom she killed, until she ended up as a single mother with two boys and three girls. Then she began to torture and kill the girls, one after another, as they became old enough that their beauty made her angry. Prepare to enter a closed-off realm of nightmare, when you read this one.