Danya Kukafka, the bestselling author of GIRL IN SNOW, returns with NOTES ON AN EXECUTION, an emotionally resonant and grippingly taut literary thriller written in the vein of LONG BRIGHT RIVER and REAL EASY.

“Inmate, state your name and number.” Ansel Packer, 999631, is 12 hours away from his execution, his punishment for the murders of three teenage girls in the summer of 1990. We know from the start that Ansel is guilty --- everything about him, from his time on death row to his quiet cockiness, confirms it --- but he seems to feel that his story is not over yet, that the world need only hear his philosophy on life to understand how he arrived at this moment. Of course, in true jailbird fashion, Ansel has a plan to escape his sentencing: a female guard he has charmed and swindled has promised him an escape route. But even so, these hours prove to be a time of introspection for Ansel; as he recounts the story of his life, he cannot help but think of the women who shaped him.

"Kukafka writes gorgeous, spellbinding prose, distilling huge, complicated themes into crystalline moments of deep, painful truths.... [NOTES ON AN EXECUTION is] a vital addition to the suspense genre and to the larger conversation about violent crime."

In alternating chapters, Kukafka introduces each of these ladies on their own terms: Lavender, Ansel’s teenage mother; Saffron Singh, the homicide detective who brought Ansel to justice; and Hazel, Ansel’s sister-in-law. Through Lavender we witness an abusive, predatory marriage, the foundation for Ansel’s birth. Lavender was wooed by Ansel’s older father when she was only 16, and within six months she was neatly imprisoned on his farm in upstate New York. Although Lavender tried to shield her young son from her husband’s cruelty, already we see the signs that something is not quite right with Ansel. He has a near preternatural intelligence, and on one occasion he emerges bloodstained from the woods surrounding their home clutching a beheaded chipmunk.

But Kukafka does not rely on these sensationalized, textbook qualities of serial killers alone. Instead she walks us, step by harrowing step, through Lavender’s abuse, gazing unflinchingly upon Ansel’s childhood and that of his infant brother until finally Lavender sacrifices herself to save her sons. What she intends as a supreme moment of kindness, the greatest possible display of a mother’s love, Ansel perceives only as abandonment.

Later, as a child in a foster home, Ansel meets a young girl named Saffron. Ansel is the preteen heartthrob of the foster home --- handsome, introspective and enticing with his tragic background. But the closer Saffron gets to Ansel, the more she sees that his stoicism and effortless charm are masking something much darker. She is the first person to witness his own budding cruelty, the way he cannot emote like the children around him, even as they nurture their own hurts, betrayals and abandonments. Her interactions with him come to shape her future as she exits the foster care system and, learning of a series of disappearances nearby, turns her life around to enter the police force.

Finally, we meet Hazel, the less beautiful, less intelligent half of a pair of twins who is always second fiddle to her sister, Jenny. But when Jenny brings home a handsome, quiet boy from college, Hazel starts to sense that she has finally won the silent competition between them, even though she cannot explain how. Jenny tells her sister in a hushed whisper that her boyfriend, Ansel, cannot feel, but whatever he has for her --- if it cannot be called love --- is powerful, all-consuming and possessive. Like Saffron, Hazel senses that something is off about Ansel, which he tries desperately to bury under his philosophical musings about good and evil and his magnetic charm.

Between each woman’s story, we return to Ansel, who is awaiting the grim reaper in his cell. We already know that he cannot be trusted, but Kukafka writes him with such searing intensity that it becomes quite easy to fall for him in this most vulnerable of moments. And yet, through the eyes of the women closest to him, we cannot ignore the haunting, horrifying portrait of evil that they paint of him. Throughout, Kukafka distills brief snapshots into Ansel’s Theory, a five-notebook missive on his philosophy of life --- a theory that there is no such thing as good or evil, only memory and choice, what has happened to us and who we choose to be. The Theory, in Ansel’s hands, is intoxicating, and Kukafka draws on the popularity and proliferance of true crime dramas and documentaries to force her readers to ask, “What really makes this man tick?” But the punchline is that it doesn’t matter. Only Ansel’s actions do.

NOTES ON AN EXECUTION is, at its heart, a portrait of an evil man wrapped in even more detailed portraits of the women drawn into his orbit. But to leave the novel here would be a disservice to Kukafka’s genius; this surface-level read is only half of what the book does. In drawing us into Ansel’s life and the ripples he has caused in the lives of his mother, sister-in-law and victims, she confronts some of the hardest-hitting questions about our fascination with crime: Why are we obsessed with men who kill? Why do we romanticize them and their actions? And why, in the end, do we almost never think about or discuss the women left in a killer’s wake?

If you have already read GIRL IN SNOW, you know that Kukafka writes gorgeous, spellbinding prose, distilling huge, complicated themes into crystalline moments of deep, painful truths. And if you haven’t, don’t miss the chance to discover her with NOTES ON AN EXECUTION, a vital addition to the suspense genre and to the larger conversation about violent crime.