Notes on an Execution

Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he has done, and he does not want to die — he wants to be understood, even celebrated. As the clock runs down in a Texas prison, Danya Kukafka's second novel turns deliberately away from him and toward the women whose lives his violence shaped.

Lavender is seventeen when Ansel is born, held with her infant on an isolated upstate New York farmhouse by his father, Johnny Packer. Hazel is the twin sister of Jenny, the woman Ansel marries, and watches that marriage with a wariness she cannot argue herself out of. Saffron Singh knew Ansel as a child in foster care and grew up to become the investigator who spent years on the disappearances he left behind.

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, Notes on an Execution is a work of literary suspense that refuses the shape of the story it is telling. Moving between the countdown of Ansel's last hours and three decades of the lives around him, Kukafka interrogates a culture that turns violent men into objects of fascination, and asks what is lost when the women in the frame are treated as the backdrop to one of them.