A perfect execution
By: Tim Binding.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 295
Subjects: Executions and executioners -- Fiction; England -- Fiction
Description: In the Vale of Aylesbury, near Oxford, during World War II, a young man named Jeremiah Bembo is shaken to his core by the sight of a downed German pilot - mortally wounded, taunted by villagers, hanging from a tree. This horrible vision of death effects a profound change in him, and presents a kind of calling: to become a benevolent executioner, a figure of succor and compassion in men's final hours.

In time he is England's swiftest, most expert hangman, a revered and dreaded legend known as Solomon Straw.

A Perfect Execution is the story of Jeremiah, of Solomon, of a man so moved by death that he becomes a merciful angel. It is also the story of the world that turns around him: of his wife, Judith, whose passions wash like tides over her husband's stony stillness; of his brash cousin, Will, who vies for Judith's heart; and of three restless young people whose longings intersect in a small-town tragedy that encompasses Jeremiah, Judith, Will - and Solomon Straw.