It’s here that Kukafka makes her first – and best – decision: She focuses the novel’s dramatic energy not on Packer but on the women left in the ripple of his actions. More: 'Succession' star Brian Cox talks memoir, Logan Roy's planned exit, turning down 'Game of Thrones' It’s that absence that is so hard for us to reckon with.

Most serial killers are not charming and erudite with fascinating motivations. Our desire to know more about these men – always men – has fueled our entertainment for far too long, but principally since the 1980s, when Thomas Harris’ depiction of Hannibal Lecter in “Red Dragon” and then, more notably, in “The Silence of the Lambs,” helped launch a macabre genre that became more prurient and exploitative of women with each passing year. He was the kind of kid we know all too well in reality and fiction, the kind who ends up recognizable by a single name, like Dahmer, or by a horrific nickname, like the Night Stalker. As a child, he tortured animals, flayed them and displayed them. The truth is sobering: There isn’t a time. When we meet him, he’s ticking down the last 12 hours of his life, hoping in equal measure for a reprieve from the state or a fantastic escape – neither seems like a realistic possibility – while also examining the choices he made that brought him to his ultimate fate: “There must have been a time… time before you were like this.”

Serial killer Ansel Packer is on death row for four murders we know he committed. There’s no mystery at the heart of “Notes on an Execution,” Danya Kukafka’s poetic and mesmerizing second novel (William Morrow, 320 pp., ★★★★ out of four, out Tuesday). Watch Video: Martha Stewart reveals she dated Anthony Hopkins

Kukafka notes on an execution