4.5 stars. Another 'what if' scenario that terrifies and fascinates.

No. It wouldn't be possible, would it? A change in the law to allow for the prosecutors of wrongly-accused and executed prisoners to themselves face the death penalty. Here it is.

A hypothetical thought experiment both as a novel and within the novel becomes the world the characters inhabit.

In a multi-pronged narrative we see how Justine both became embroiled in the world of the death penalty and cases, to the case that causes her own possible downfall. At the same time we learn the backstory of the convicted murderer whose death Justine, just once, pushes for, wins, but whose circumstances may not have been all they seemed. There's other involved people on both sides, and a twisty plot to unravel that shows flaws in the system as well as our own flawed humanity.

A generic description maybe, but the story needs unravelling by the reader. It was an engrossing story, with some intense characters and situations and a thought experiment brought to life that wanted to be played out to understand.

Great writing and plotting, lots of very grey-area characters that demonstrate how very not-black-and-white we need to be.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.

Christine Dalcher is the queen of dystopian futures, imagining societies where there are limits on the numbers of words women can say, or a world in which women have all the power. I was completely bowled over by her previous books so was very keen to read 'The Sentence'.
It took me a little while to warm up to the storyline this time round but once I did, I was hooked, In a world where a prosecutor seeking the death penalty stakes their own life on the line in case of a wrongful conviction, the number of death penalties has understandably fallen but there are still one or two.
Justine Boucher was at the fore-front of the anti death penalty movement as a law student but once in practice still found herself asking for the death penalty for a brutal child killer. His wife is determined to clear his name, but if she can, then Justine's neck is literally on the line.
Another fascinating high concept book, expertly told.

Having previously read and having thoroughly enjoyed ‘Vox’, I was really excited to read ‘The Sentence’. The idea of the book is amazing, I was really interested in the thought provoking concept of the book. The writing style was fantastic and thoroughly enjoyable.

However, the problem is that as the story went on, I couldn’t get my head around why any lawyer in their right mind would EVER push for the death penalty - and the explanation in this case felt wholly insufficient which was something I struggled with. I could not understand the protagonists moral compass as it seemed to change from one extreme to the other! And it was not helped by the fact that I found her to be a completely unlikeable character. So whilst the concept was great, unfortunately it was not a story that I was gripped by.

I mostly enjoyed this book, however found the actions of Justine at the end of the book a little unbelievable, still worthy of a read! Due to a new law in her state, any lawyer who asks for the Death Penalty will be expected to take the punishment themselves if the person on Death Row is subsequently found innocent. The prosecutor in this case Justine, decides to take on a case after her husband dies, but she is in the throws of horrendous grief. Despite prior to her husbands death she was against the death penalty and was actually highly visable in a group trying to abolish it. She is sure she has the right man. She gets her conviction, but is it a straight forward as the evidence presented?

Also reviewed on Amazon, not showing yet.

Another fabulous Christina Dalcher book, this time exploring the death penalty and what would happen if a conviction was overturned after the death penalty had occurred a law stating the prosecutor must die.

Fascinating concept and overall well executed. A very thought provoking topic, and one that’s sure to divide reader opinions. In terms of moral/ethical rights and wrongs

'The Sentence' is an incredibly well-considered exploration of the criminal justice system and death penalty. The book is beautifully constructed and makes for a compelling read. Christina Dalcher is the reigning Queen of Dystopian Fiction. The work she is producing is fresh, innovative and extremely exciting. A highly recommended read which would make for an immensely interesting book club choice.

Christina Dalcher’s dystopian novels should always be an immediate addition to a to-read pile, and The Sentence is no exception. Strap in for this nail-biting thriller set in an America that has rewritten the rules around the death penalty: new legislation, introduced to dissuade attorneys from seeking the ultimate punishment, states that if an executed criminal is later found to be innocent and the conviction overturned, the prosecuting attorney will be put to death. So far, this has kept executions to a minimum, with very few lawyers convinced beyond reasonable doubt and willing to put their own life on the line. Prosecutor Justine Boucher has only requested the death penalty in one case, but new evidence has emerged questioning the verdict: now it’s a race against time to put things right. This is an unblinking look at the horrific and complex nature of the death penalty: as we move between chapters, we leave the main storyline to read the diary of a Death Row inmate and recollections from Justine’s college years, interspersed with grim descriptions of executions and the moral conundrums struggled with by academics and legal practitioners alike. Is it ever right to take a life? A brilliantly written, heavy but thought-provoking read that will satisfy those looking for a challenge this summer.

Featured in the August 2023 issue of Cambridge Edition magazine

Having previously loved Vox but this author I had high expectations and I'm very pleased to say that they were more than met. The subject matter of the book - the death penalty - is naturally a contentious one but the way that Dalcher told the two first person narratives that run through the book was masterly. There is a real sense of urgency throughout and the plot is fast paced and really makes you question your own views. Not sure how I feel about the open ended finish of the book but this one will be in my head for a long time and I'm not even sure which proposed ending I would have liked most.

Can you ever be so sure of something that you would put your own life on the line? What of later you fou d out you were wrong?
This book is a great moral quandry. It's about the death penalty, whether two wrongs can ever make a right but also about how your moral compass can change depending on the situation.
The story is compelling and the need to know what choices everyone makes keeps you turning the pages.

I’m a big Christina Dalcher fan and this book went straight to the top of my to be red list when I found it on NetGalley
I loved the concept of the novel which was that lawyers prosecuting a wrongful conviction for the death penalty would be liable themselves to be sentenced to death for their mistake. Ultimately, I’ve failed to connect with the main characters which made me less invested in the outcome of the court cases than I might’ve hoped for,because of this, I found that I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed the authors’s previous novels.
There were some elements of the book, which I particularly enjoyed for example, the women in red watching from the sidelines where very sinister reminiscent of the handmaiden’s tale
I also loved the cheeky line. “Someone will write at least one dystopian thriller about prosecutorial accountability which will inevitably be tended to Netflix series that I’ve never watched” very funny. No doubt this is exactly what will happen to this book.

On this occasion, I found that the authors writing style was reminiscent of early Jodie picoult novels .
I read an early copy of the book on NetGalley UK book was published in the UK on 17th August 2023 by HQ general fiction
This review will appear on NetGalley UK good reads Amazon, UK, and my book blog bionicsarahsbooks.wordpress.com

I love an original idea and the premise of this book was certainly that. How these authors come up with these things I will never know but I am completely in awe of them.

What I wasn’t expecting though was all the tiny threads that made up the bigger picture and how cleverly they would come together.
Starting with an excerpt from a prisoners letter with only a prison number to identify them I was immediately sucked in and these continued to be interspersed throughout the book.

The main character is Justine Boucher and both her past and her present lead her to make certain decisions that could prove her ultimate downfall and cost her life. It is so difficult to not say too much as this is both a book I want to shout about, open my gob and let it all spill but also a book where it’s secrets are best discovered by the reader.

Really though the crux of this book was a group of people coming up with an idea to stop the death penalty being requested and how it all goes terribly wrong. The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all.

Living in England it is not something we have to really consider but I was surprised to learn that Britain only finally abolished the death penalty in 1998 and the last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.

I always thought my feelings on it were pretty clear cut but I hadn’t considered how I would feel if it was personal and a loved one was the victim. Would my feelings change? This is another big consideration that faces Justine.

This book completely and utterly blew my mind and the ending was sheer perfection. Not many books still have me thinking about them after I’ve moved on to my next read but this one will stay with me a long time.

Original, clever, thought provoking and thankfully just a work of fiction!

I have loved some of Dalcher’s previous books (Vox and Q were both phenomenal). Her signature setting of modern day with a dystopian twist is interesting to read and usually has me captured.

There just seemed to be something a bit ‘off’ in The Sentence though. It felt to be a lot more like an unpolished draft than a finely tuned final product (and to be fair I was reading an advance copy so maybe there have been some changes). The pacing felt a bit off, with jumps between perspectives that took be a couple of goes to work out – and I’m happy to admit that could just have been me, but I’m usually OK with those things. We also had time jumps back to Justine’s early career that happen without them being marked out.

All that said, I enjoyed this legal thriller enough to keep reading to the end as I wanted to know what the resolution was – although a word of warning there too – if you like all your plot lines neatly tied up (I do) you won’t find that in this book either.

I loved the concept of this one, a law put in place intended to stop capital punishment by making the ultimate buck stop with the prosecutor who asked for the sentence. Obviously though it doesn’t stop everyone and we join Justine’s story as it seems like the law could be about to be tested for the first time.

I found Justine to be an engaging main character but also incredibly frustrating, she made so many wrong choices for no apparent reason and was quite frankly not that nice to the people who cared about her, by the end of the book I wasn’t sure why they kept bothering with her.

All in all I think this one was a bit of a miss for me, although I read all of it so there was enough to keep me coming back.

Such an original concept underpins this riveting story. Following a change of law in the USA in certain states, the death penalty, if called for, and a person is erroneously executed, then the prosecutor must pay with their life
This is the story of Justine, a prosecutor who was certain Jake was a child murderer, and so called for the death penalty.
The story is told from Justines perspective and Jakes. It is disturbing and very engaging. A define must read book

Capital punishment is a divisive subject and one which I find absolutely fascinating so it was a given that I was going to request the advanced proof copy of The Sentence.

The Sentence begins with death row inmate #39384 spending the last few hours of his life thinking about the events that lead to him being on death row

"Someday, I'll meet you again, my darling Emily, with those eyes of hers that see all the way to the bottom of your soul, that see the lies and the truth.. My little Jake - although by then he;ll be a grown man instead of a six-year-old. Maybe a college graduate, maybe married, maybe a rock star or a writer. Who knows where his life will take him? None of us can ever know that? But I sure as shit hope he ends up better off than his old man."

Justine Boucher is a lawyer trying to decide whether to ask for the death penalty in a murder case, a case where it is clear the defendent is guilty. She knows whatever decision she makes someone will be upset by it.

"They'll hate me. Well half of them will hate me. But a woman can survive hatred. Hatred didn't kill you. Hatred isn't on the same plane as a lethal cocktail working it's way through your veins or two thousand volts of electricity stopping your heart. Or, maybe worse than that, a lifelong shadow of guilt."

Christina Dalcher is excellent at creating books that make you think and The Sentence is no exception to this rule. I don't believe in an eye for an eye, and I am firmly against the use of capital punishment...but still there is the lingering doubt. If a member of my family was murdered, my child for example, would I want to see their murderer dead? Almost certainly, but I studied this topic at university and I know that the system doesn't always get it right.I saw a quote once, in a capital punishment display in an American prison, which read something along the lines of A man is better than the worse thing he has done in his life.

"I expect its mainly ignorance of some key facts that keep them sticking to their opinions like glue. They don't know how often mistakes are made - an average of four death row inmates are exonorated every year. They don't realise executions have shit to do with lowering homicide rates. And as much as they yell about the expense of keeping every first-degree murderer in prison for life, they don't have a clue that a death penalty case in Texas costs over two million dollars - three times what it would cost to put someone in a single cell for fourty years so they want to see a man in a chair. Or a man on a gurney. Or a man in a gas chamber. It's all about the emotion."

In the reality of The Sentence the Remedies Act was introduced as a way to make everyone happy, a way to keep the death penalty whilst ensuring nobody would ever ask for it. If the death penalty is asked for and the person is later proven innocent then the person who called for the death penalty can be put to death.

I love that The Sentence highlights the very real flaws in the capital punishment system. For example, the fact that woman are higlhly unlikely to be put to death, whereas black man are the most likely group to be put to death.

"I'll tell you when it comes to firing up the execution engine, Texas wins every time. And there are other ways you can be unlucky. You can be in the South instead of the Northeast. You can be black instead of a woman.

But there are ways you can be lucky. You can be one of the almost two hundred people who got released from death row because - get this - they were innocent all along. That's about four every year since the early seventies. Sometimes it's because a witness lies. Sometimes the witness ID's the wrong guy. Sometimes the public defender ends up being fresh out of a fifth rate law school, wet behind the ears and bearly more literate than the person he's supposed to be defending. There's also a hell of a lot of what's called official misconduct, which I guess means nothing more or less than bad cops doing bad things for bad reasons."

We know from the beginning that Justine doesn't believe in the death penalty, so why did she call for it in one case...and what will she do when she learns she may have got it wrong?

Stupendous book.

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A review by you!
The Sentence by Christina Dalcher
challenging dark tense medium-paced
3.75

Would you sentence someone to death, if you had to put your life on the line if they're found innocent later on. The Remedies Act waa brought in to stop innocent people being put to death.

Dalcher has really made me question the death penalty.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Told in two perspectives by Justine and diary enteries for Death Row Inmate #39384 at two different points it keeps you on edge and needing to know more. It was a slightly slow start for me but after the first third I didn't want to put it down. Justine did annoy me from time to time, but then I think what would I be like if I was in her shoes.

I enjoyed how this one was fleshed out and flowed. I recommend this.

This book is fabulous and also one that hopefully will start conversations about capital punishment and ‘what if’ scenarios. I was shocked to learn that in some states in America if the death penalty is requested by the prosecutor and carried out and subsequently it is found the plaintiff was innocent, then the prosecutor automatically gets the death penalty. This book is very well balanced and we encounter a prosecutor who once asked for the death penalty and through separate chapters we get to know the plaintiff. I have already recommended this book to friends as I need a discussion with them about the book.

This book was less dystopian than previous books by the author which worked really well for this particular subject matter. In this version of America a law has been passed so that if a prosecutor seeks the death penalty in a case and then more evidence is revealed that later proves the defendant was innocent then the prosecutor will face the same fate. The fact that a law like that could have been created makes it such a realistic and chilling concept.

I really liked how the back stories of the main characters unfolded to better explain the reasons they made the decisions that led them to their current situations. The alternating timelines really made the story a dynamic read.

The characterisation in this book was so well done. I felt such an emotional connection towards Justine and Jake. The other characters in the story equally have such pivotal parts to play in bringing the story together as a whole.

This is such a thought provoking read that will have you questioning your morals and opinions on such an emotive subject.

I'd forgotten quite how good Christina Dalcher's books are. The Sentence was well written with well presented arguments and very much intended to make you think. It was interesting to me how a book that so staunchly anti- capital punishment, also looked at the arguments for it.

This book is dark. I would definitely say don't read it if you're at all squeamish about certain crimes because some bits of the book go into detail about heinous crime. Let's just say, I was really glad I was reading a fictional book about fictional people at some points and while I know that there are real crimes that are just as horrible, I can avoid reading them.

The ending of the book was understandable. I could see how she was going to end it a few pages before the end and while it frustrated me endlessly, I don't think she could have ended it any other way. It was an ending that suited the book, even if not one that entirely satisfies the reader.

I'm really glad I had the chance to review this book as I enjoyed reading it immensely and it reminded me how much I originally enjoyed the previous book of hers that I reviewed.

This book just kept getting better and better. It took over me; it was all I could think about and I couldn’t eat, sleep or do anything until I’d finished it. Christina has taken a difficult subject matter and turned it into something so creative I struggle to explain how much it impacted my mind. This is quite possibly one of my favourite books ever!