Elizabeth Bruenig’s sensitive reporting pulls back the curtain on an increasingly routine crisis in America’s death chambers: state executioner’s inability to kill the condemned humanely. She takes readers to the torturous final moments of death row inmates, while considering the often heinous crimes that earned them their sentences, and the complex legal system and prison bureaucracy that uphold them. Thoughtful and profound, Bruenig negotiates the culture of violence in America and examines what’s at stake when we refuse to see the humanity in those who have done the inhumane.