Product Description

She's searching for the man who killed her daughter. But will he find her first?

In a novel that grips like a waking nightmare, master storyteller Joy Fielding creates a searing examination of a horrifying crime, the limits of the law, and a woman's terrifying journey into a killer's twisted mind.

In one tragic afternoon everything changed. Until then, Gail Walton had considered herself lucky. With a successful husband, two daughters, and a house in the New Jersey suburbs, Gail lived a safe and predictable life. Then the unthinkable happened: her six-year-old daughter Cindy was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered.

Consumed by grief and rage, Gail has retreated into herself. Her family and friends fear she's losing her grip on reality. The police warn her to let them handle the investigation. But not one of them knows the truth: that Gail has a description of the killer, a plan to set herself up as a decoy, and a room in a run-down boardinghouse. And Gail Walton has just bought herself a gun....

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #130481 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-01
• Released on: 1998-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780440223382
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Fielding has made the woman-in-jeopardy genre her own."
--People

"Fielding knows how to turn the screws of suspense."
--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

New York Times bestselling author of Missing Pieces -- Review

Review
"Fielding has made the woman-in-jeopardy genre her own."
--People

"Fielding knows how to turn the screws of suspense."
--The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

New York Times bestselling author of Missing Pieces

From the Inside Flap
She's searching for the man who killed her daughter. But will he find her first?

In a novel that grips like a waking nightmare, master storyteller Joy Fielding creates a searing examination of a horrifying crime, the limits of the law, and a woman's terrifying journey into a killer's twisted mind.

In one tragic afternoon everything changed. Until then, Gail Walton had considered herself lucky. With a successful husband, two daughters, and a house in the New Jersey suburbs, Gail lived a safe and predictable life. Then the unthinkable happened: her six-year-old daughter Cindy was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered.

Consumed by grief and rage, Gail has retreated into herself. Her family and friends fear she's losing her grip on reality. The police warn her to let them handle the investigation. But not one of them knows the truth: that Gail has a description of the killer, a plan to set herself up as a decoy, and a room in a run-down boardinghouse. And Gail Walton has just bought herself a gun....

Customer Reviews

A Mother's Grief Has No End At All!
I was surprised to see the poor(?) ratings on this book. I thought that the book had been very well written and couldn't put it down.

Gail, her husband Jack, Jennifer her oldest, and Cindy the youngest, were one happy family. Having plenty of wealth, a beautiful home, and all that goes with a richer lifestyle, you wouldn't want for anything more. But perfect doesn't last forever when six-year-old Cindy is raped and murdered. Her killer leaves her under a bush afterwords like a piece of trash.

When Gail comes home after an afternoon with her friend to find police there waiting on her, she is very fearful. Of course the minute she learns the news, she is in denial big time, a state of shock, and takes forever to even be able to talk at all.

As life continues on, Gail has her mind on one thing only-and that is finding Cindy's killer no matter what. She does very dangerous things; hitchhikes on the streets, and goes to very dangerous parts of town to find the killer. The police just won't work fast enough for her.

She nearly gets herself killed many times over, and not only that she wants to die. She finds crazy ways to injure herself so that she can end her life and be with Cindy. There is no end to the agony until-you must read and find out.

Easy read, terrible ending
"Life Penalty" was a fairly easy read, although a little far-fetched. Jack was too patient, Jennifer to perfect, and Gail just plain too obsessed. I was pleased to see that the police knew what she was doing and that they weren't portrayed as incompetent, but didn't Jack ever phone home during the day and wonder where his wife was? Didn't Jennifer mention coming home to an empty house to him? I also thought the ending was terrible - I understand why she did what she did and even that it wasn't important to the reader to know what the results of her actions would be, but I thought it unreasonable to expect that the reader would accept the fact that other characters reacted the way they did. I enjoyed the book to the extent that I would read future books by this author, but not enough to give it a ringing endorsment.

Poor Story
I didn't like Gail either and thought she was the single biggest idiot to ever hit the literary pages. The loss of a child is the worst possible loss, but Gail was just such a loathsome character and did such irrational, stupid things even by trauma standards.

One thing that irked me was early in the book, after Gail learned of her daughter's murder, she pretended the hospital where she [Gail] was admitted was a setting. I didn't like the way the doctors were called actors. I didn't like the whole scenario, e.g. calling the hospital a "setting," the hospital personell "understudies," herself the "center of attention" and a doctor "a distinguished looking actor wearing a white coat," who was clearly a doctor and to REALLY add insult to injury, the "an actress in a white uniform." That whole stupid business of converting the hospital into a stage for her fantasies was an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Everybody else seemed to feel Gail was an irrational idiot. The most stupid thing she did short of that Halloween bit the park was to just accuse a man of killing her child by saying to him, "I'm her mother." The poor guy must have wondered WHOSE mother -- Jane Pauley's?! That was dangerous and just too stupid for belief.

Everything Gail did was illogical, from the park to the rental rooms to the false accusation to the stupid way she related to people and lastly, the really bad ending. I didn't like the ending at all and could not see how it could work. The ending was really a beginning, in a way and it was just so bad it made Gail even more loathsome. I didn't like her in the first place.