This gripping account is both horrifying and informative. Superbly told, it's a real page-turner in the tradition of the best thrillers with what should be the bonus that it's all true. But it's the knowledge that it's true that makes it so horrendous. It's more than just the story of a miscarriage of justice, although that would be compelling enough: it's the story of miscarriages of policing, of political process and even of the miscarriage of the means of execution itself.
There are revelations along the way about the horrors of judicial killing as we join author Ian Woods on a journey of discovery that turns him from a highly regarded and objective reporter into a friend and confidant of the man about to die - and a campaigner. Through it all he maintains a clear ethical commitment to the truth - even when it reflects badly on his friend. When he agrees to be one of the witnesses to the execution the torment between revulsion at what he's about to see and his commitment to telling the story is chilling.
There's so much demonstrably wrong with the US justice system, much of it explained in these pages, that the only negative observation I can make about this book is disappointment that it's not in every bookshop in the USA . Maybe US publishers don't like the idea of the barbarity of their capital punishment system being exposed by a visitor as perceptive as Ian Woods.