Notes On An Execution - Danya Kukafka

Thriller

Rating: 8.5/10

The main narrator of this book is a man on death row, counting down his last twelve hours all while trying to run a con on a guard and flashing back to his life before he ended up in a cage.

This was a stellar deconstruction of the crimes that occurred, the man who committed them, and a mesmerizing examination on what makes people do such things. How does their life evolve to the point that only their worst and weakest moments matter in the end?  How can the bad so savagely devour the good? Do we all live a plot already written with us in mind? Are we all just made up of other people’s perceptions?

The set-up of the flashbacks is unique in that the character picks up the telling of their own story once our prisoner has had an initial memory.  What the reader is left to speculate as the story unfolds is which of these women, if any, were his victims? 

I usually stay away from the serial killer novels, but this author did not allow her work to fall prey to the endless bounty of dead girl tropes that exist in fiction. Nor did she portray the killer as only and always monstrous.  A powerful feat of writing that I was not expecting.

Book Pairing(s): 48 Hours To Kill by Andrew Bourelle, The Dinner Guest by B.P. Walter, The Shadows by Alex North