Title: Life Penalty by Joy Fielding
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller
Rating: 1/5
A stay-at-home mom with two gorgeous daughters and a loving husband, Gail Walton was living your average middle-class life. Then the unthinkable happened: her six-year-old daughter was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered. Depressed, Gail retreats into herself and vows that if the police don't find the killer within 60 days, she'll do it herself.
I'm not sure exactly why, but I just couldn't get into Life Penalty. Part of it was the characters. Gail starts off the book as this almost perfect mother and wife and then devolves into this irrational woman whose grief and obsession overwhelm everything and ruin all of her relationships. She spends a great deal of the book imagining that she's being attacked and then putting herself in situations where she could be gravely injured or killed. And Jack was this cliched patient husband, willing to wait forever for his wife to recover despite her unwillingness to try.
As for the story itself, I found it too dark and depressing as a whole, and poorly written. I've read books that deal with dark and difficult themes in the past, but I just found that this story had no redemption to it. Gail just keeps spiraling deeper and deeper into her depression, which dragged on throughout the book with no hope of recovery. The ending itself felt rushed and the last scene just seemed completely unbelievable.
I'm hard-pressed to say what I did like about the book, other than the fact that it was a quick read. I do feel that it had a realistic depiction of the 1980s judicial system in North America, though an admittedly one-sided view.
I had a really tough time getting through the whole book and almost abandoned it a few times. Only my desire to see whether the killer was eventually found kept me reading. Overall, Life Penalty is not a book I'd recommend to anyone, but I might be willing to try reading another book by Joy Fielding in the future.
