“Notes on an Execution” is primarily about Ansel Packer, a serial killer who murders three girls in the summer of 1990. Their bodies aren’t discovered until nearly ten years later, and he is not caught until 2012. The book begins with Ansel in prison in Texas, waiting to see if his final appeal will be granted. The first 25 percent of the book details Ansel’s childhood. He was born into poverty on a rural farm in upstate New York with his abused mother and abusive father. When he is four years old, his mother finds a way to escape, calling 911 to rescue her children, Ansel and a baby brother who was never given a name, who she left behind in the farmhouse. Ansel lives the rest of his childhood in foster homes, where Saffron, another of the residents, discovers him with two squirrels and a fox which he had killed and staked out on the ground. To guarantee her silence, he places the dead, decaying fox in her bunk bed.

The book then segues into Saffron’s point of view. Saffron has gone into law enforcement, but is still haunted by her experience with Ansel in her foster home. She is on the team that discovers the missing girls, and recognizes the backpack on one of the remains as belonging to a girl that shared a foster home with herself and Ansel. Saffron spends the next 12 years trying to discover the girls’ murderer, suspecting that it is Ansel. Other points of view are those of Lavender, Ansel’s mother, and Hazel, whose sister met Ansel in college. The book intermittently flashes forward to Ansel waiting on death row, his appeal having been denied.

The novel is beautifully and hauntingly written with sparse yet elegant prose. An underlying theme is what life could have been like for Ansel and the girls, had Ansel made other choices and not murdered the three girls that summer in 1990. This is shown through Saffron’s dreams of these alternate realities for the girls, where they grow up to become women and reach their full potential. It also manifests in Ansel’s obsession with the “Theory” he has spent his life writing, in which he imagines alternate universes branching out from different choices made. Another theme is how there is good amidst evil and not everyone is wholly evil.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a well-written, haunting psychological story with fully drawn, multi-faceted characters.

(Note: Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for providing me an ARC of this book for my review).

An amazing thriller! Answl is born I to a family in which he learns the dark sides of life. From there, he puts those lessons into practice and finds himself on death row. The bar on the thriller has been raised. Absolutely tense and gripping. A must read!