REVIEW:

With just over a month left in 2021, I’m calling it. Danya Kukafka’s brilliant sophomore novel, Notes on an Execution, will take top honors as the best book I’ve read this year. (Out of 200+.)

It’s the rare unicorn of a novel that is masterfully written, has a page-turning plot, and manages to make a statement about our society all at the same time. I savored every word. I reread paragraphs to make sure I’d fully absorbed them. I wanted to get back to it whenever I had to put it down.

As author Kukafka sees it, America has a serial killer problem. It’s not that there’s a real one on the loose, but rather we obsess over - and glorify - their mythology. She writes in the Author’s Note that precedes the novel, “Average men become interesting when they start hurting women. Notes on an Execution was born from a desire to dissect this exhausting narrative.” Amen, sister.

This book does indeed belong to the women. While murderer Ansel Packer counts down the hours until his imminent execution on death row, chapters are interspersed unraveling the stories of his mother, his wife’s sister, and the (female) detective who caught him. His victims are there, too, although the violence towards them happens largely off the page. (So does some animal harm when he kills squirrels and foxes in his youth.) The killings aren’t the main event here though. Lives aren’t defined by those few fleeting moments when Ansel stole control.

I am a self-proclaimed “murderino” and have always been fascinated by the true crime narrative being eviscerated by Danya Kukafka’s razor-sharp pen. Her words kicked me right in the heart and made me realize the hypocrisy of my Friday night serial killer documentary viewings that are followed up by Saturday mornings rolling my eyes when yet another girl is ravaged in yet another thriller I’m reading. If that was her objective, then mission accomplished. Bravo.

My thanks to William Morrow and the author for the advance readers copy. Notes on an Execution is scheduled for US publication on January 25, 2022.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

In the tradition of Long Bright River and The Mars Room, a gripping and atmospheric work of literary suspense that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row, told primarily through the eyes of the women in his life — from the bestselling author of Girl in Snow.

Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women — a mother, a sister, a homicide detective — we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.