Notes on an Execution

• Author: Danya Kukafka
• Genre: Mystery/Thriller
• Publication Date: January 25, 2022
• Publisher: HarperAudio

A 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.

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.

I’m actually surprised that this isn’t a more hyped book, because I found it fascinating. It isn’t a fast-moving story, but if it was, I think it would have taken something away from it. And it brought to mind some intriguing parallels to The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold, in how our society views serial killers and their victims. 

We hear this story through the eyes of four characters: Ansel Packer, a serial killer; his mother, Lavender; Hazel, Ansel’s wife’s twin sister; and Saffy (short for Saffron), a homicide detective who has been after Ansel. I found it especially intriguing that all of the female POV characters have names that describe colors, and while lavender and saffron can also be used as spices.

Ansel is given the least amount of on-page time, and it goes along with the themes of the story. His chapters are all in the present-day, looking back on his life and his crimes, but also counting down the little bit of time that he has left until his execution. The chapters from the POV of the female characters, on the other hand, range in when they take place. We get to hear about various aspects of Anselm’s live through the eyes of the women who have been closest to him, although in different ways.

Lavender gives us some insight into Anselm’s earliest years, while also dealing with her own issues that haunt her for many years into the future. She gave birth to him very young, and didn’t have many options available to her at the time. And while she made a difficult and controversial choice, it was hard to fault her for what she saw as the only choice that she had open to her.

Hazel and her sister Jenny are twins, who haven’t been separated since they were born. But when Jenny starts dating Anselm, and eventually marries him, Hazel is forced to watch her sister change, and along with it, their bond changes as well. 

Saffy is a homicide detective, who has made her entire focus bringing down bad guys. This allows her to avoid looking at her own life. And she does this by losing herself in cases, like hunting for the really bad guys. Guys like Anselm Packer. 

There were a lot of different things that I really liked about this book, if you couldn’t already guess by my rating. Firstly, I loved the way that Kukafka showed readers the way that early childhood experiences had an impact on shaping Anselm’s life in an empathetic way without providing justification or sympathy for his later behaviors. In fact, the author really doesn’t encourage the reader to draw any specific conclusion, but allows readers to come up with their own ideas depending on what is presented. 

In society, an inordinate amount of attention is paid to the serial killers, while their victims are far too often lost in the rush to learn more about the killer: who they are, what happened in their past to make them kill, how they chose their targets, if the killer is still hiding any secrets, and the most pressing question of all, whether they really did it or not. However, after reading Hallie Rubenhold’s book, I’ve started questioning why that is, and why we don’t focus more on the victims. You see, the killers made a choice: they have free will over their behavior, and no one is forcing them to kill someone. But the victims don’t have a choice over their death. The choice is made for them by the killer, and then even in death, they are overlooked in favor of being a fan of the person who decided to kill them. That’s pretty insulting, and doesn’t look really good for our society, in my opinion. 

This book subverts that societal focus by forcing readers to focus on a different aspect of people affected by serial killers: the people who are left behind. While we don’t really get to see much about the victims directly (whew), we do get to see a decent cross-section of the lives that are impacted by Anselm’s life and actions. Lavender knew Anselm best at the start of his life, but as a teenage mother in an impossible situation, she was unable to make the best decisions for both of them. By the time Anselm was in his late teens, he was already irreversibly intertwined in Hazel and her sister’s lives, and Hazel knew him better than anyone for a while, even better than her sister, because she was able to see him without looking through the rose-colored lenses of love. And as Saffy was hunting Anselm, she was able to get to know him better than anyone else because only she knew about all of his crimes and his history, which he had made a habit of lying about.

Ultimately, this slow-paced exploration of a man in his last few hours on death row, and the exploration of not simply the crimes that landed him there, but the journey of his life as told through the women who were closest to him, was a brilliant and unique story that I found difficult to stop reading. I chose to listen to this as an audiobook, and both Mozhan Marnò and Jim Meskimen did a great job with the character narration. I would highly recommend this to readers who don’t mind a slower moving story with rich character development, exploration, and growth, and a plot that will keep you riveted. And it might just make you look differently at serial killers and their victims, and how they’re portrayed in the media. 

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