Published 17th August 2023 by HQ.
From the cover of the book:
The one decision you can’t take back...Prosecutor, Justine Boucher has only asked for the death penalty once, in a brutal murder case.
In doing so, she put her own life on the line. Because, if the convicted are later found innocent, the lawyer who requested the execution will be sentenced to death.
Justine had no doubt that the man she sent to the chair was guilty.
Until now.
Presented with evidence that could prove his innocence, Justine must find out the truth before anyone else does.
Her life depends on it.
***********
Justine Boucher is a prosecutor in the commonwealth (once state) of Virginia. She has only asked for the death penalty for one of her cases - the brutal murder of a child. It is a case that haunts her for a number of reasons, not least because the introduction of the controversial Remedies Act meant putting her own life on the line too.
She has always been sure she sent a guilty man to chair, but now she is not so sure. A piece of evidence has cropped up that calls the trial verdict into question, and the clock is counting down for Justine to discover what this means for her own survival.
Set in near-future USA, The Sentence delves into the morass of knotty issues around the death penalty. Told through the eyes of prosecutor Justine Boucher, a woman formerly involved in a campaign to abolish the death penalty, this explores what would happen if the decision to subject someone to state-sanctioned execution is boiled down to a single question - whether or not the prosecutor is 100% certain that they are guilty of the crime. The introduction of the Remedies Act dictates that should any prosecutor calling for the death penalty subsequently be proved to be wrong, then they will forfeit their own life in recompense, so this is not a decision to be taken lightly.
Justine suddenly finds herself questioning whether she was right to send Jake Milford, a man who entered a guilty plea, to the chair at a time when her personal life was in free-fall, especially when it appears she may have been wrong. There are those who would dearly love to see her pay for a mistake, and their sinister intent adds a delicious sense of menace to what is already a tense situation, as Justine frantically tries to make sense of the unexpected.
The narrative moves back and forth in time, creating a picture of how and why Justine is now in such a perilous situation, but the whole truth only comes to light when Dalcher works storytelling magic by weaving together the threads of Justine and Jake Milford's stories. This happens by the flow of the novel being periodically broken up by glimpses into the mind of Jake Milford himself, in his written 'death-bed' testimony, as the condemned man awaits his fate on death row. This brings about a way for Justine to make amends in a very clever twist.
Dalcher has really done her research here, and in the telling of this gripping tale she forces you to confront the many issues that surround the arbitrariness of sentencing any human being to the death penalty, laying them out in such an accessible way. Intriguingly, she never answers any of the intelligently posed questions she throws at you herself, merely presenting the complexities, the contradictions, and the nitty gritty of both sides of the argument for you to make up your own mind. Growing up in the UK where the death penalty was suspended before my birth, this really made me think about the differences between our legal system and that of the USA too.
The Sentence is the most thought provoking book I have read since Nikki Erlick's excellent debut, The Measure, and it will stay with me in much the same way. It is astonishingly powerful novel and guaranteed to leave you thinking long and hard about your own beliefs when it comes to the question of the death penalty.
The Sentence is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.
Thank you to HQ for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
About the author:
Her flash fiction appears in The Molotov Cocktail Prize Winners' anthology, Whiskey Paper, Split Lip Magazine, (b)OINK, Five2One Magazine, and several others.
Christina lives with her husband and the ghosts of several dogs and cats.
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