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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In Rob Kaufman’s Death Sentence, Ethan Winslow leaves a funeral unable to forget the way people finally speak honestly once death is on the table. Instead of waiting for his own ending, he invents acute kidney failure and begins telling the people around him that time is running out. His brother David hears the news through years of resentment. His ex-wife Vicki arrives with old anger still intact. Claire, the woman Ethan never fully let go of, brings a love he has never known how to hold. Janet, a neighbor and colleague, learns the truth of the lie before anyone else. What Ethan thinks will give him honesty soon changes into something far darker, as grief, jealousy, and family history begin affecting the life he is pretending to lose.
Rob Kaufman’s Death Sentence is a fantastic work of psychological suspense. The author creatively turns a staged diagnosis into a legitimate, albeit terribly executed question: what would people say if they believed there was no later? Kaufman’s strength as a writer shines brightest in the relationship and settings between brothers. David’s visit, with renal brochures on the coffee table and Kevin’s death brought back into the room, gives the book some of its hardest family material. Ethan is not easy, but Kaufman makes him fascinating by keeping his need for proof painfully human. Alan is wonderful because his devotion to Ethan never feels simple once the lie starts harming people. The author's intelligent wit is off the charts, and we get nuggets of what readers can relate to after an actual death with hilarious lines about the good intentions of well-meaning people through the art of the meal train. “Acts of kindness piled in ceramic and aluminum. Love, baked at 350 degrees.” Well written and thoughtful with a heck of a twist, readers who enjoy psychological suspense will adore this book.
