Death Sentence

By Brian Garfield

In the sequel to Death Wish, Paul Benjamin continues his vigilante killing spree.

Paul Benjamin was an ordinary New Yorker until a gang of drug addicts killed his wife and raped his daughter. When the police proved helpless, Benjamin bought a gun and found his own vengeance, methodically tracking the addicts and killing them one by one. Now he is in Chicago, and the cycle of violence is about to begin anew. On his first night in the city, he stumbles out of a bar in a bad part of town, pretending to be drunk. When two thugs set upon him, they find their quarry sober and armed. He kills them both, escaping before the police arrive. They will not be the last of Chicago's criminal class to suffer his wrath.

Written by Garfield as 'penance' for the success of the grisly film adaptation of Death Wish, this sequel shows that when a decent man relies on violence to settle scores, murder becomes addictive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784084608

Brian Garfield

The author of more than seventy books, Brian Garfield (1939–2018) is one of the country’s most prolific writers of thrillers, westerns, and other genre fiction. Raised in Arizona, Garfield found success at an early age, publishing his first novel when he was only eighteen. After time in the army, a few years touring with a jazz band, and earning an MA from the University of Arizona, he settled into writing full-time.   Garfield served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and the Western Writers of America, the only author to have held both offices. Nineteen of his novels have been made into films, including Death Wish (1972), The Last Hard Men (1976), and Hopscotch (1975), for which he wrote the screenplay. To date, his novels have sold over twenty million copies worldwide.

Reviews for Death Sentence

[bensdad00 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A sequel to the wildly popular 'Death Wish'. Garfield continues to examine, in an entertaining way, the various viewpoints of crime and punishment, and the appropriate role of the government and its citizens. Even 40 years after its publication, the arguments are still relevant and the answers still unclear. The only failing, in my eyes, is the rather weak establishment of the female lead.

[dexcel13 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Rather Average, sequal to Death Wish byt he sma eAuther. Kind of lacked the thrill of the first book. Wasn't a straight copy of the first one with the main character having to confront what he is doing and how it has unexpected knock on effects.

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this sequel to Brian Garfield's Death Wish, it's six months later and Paul Benjamin is up to his old tricks in a new city, as he exacts his own brand of justice on the streets of Chicago. But with a new girl in his life - as well as her suspicious former mentor - and a copycat vigilante on the loose as well, Paul finds himself questioning not only his actions, but the consequences of them, both for him and society as a whole.Much like the first novel, Death Sentence handle the emotional and philosophical turmoil of the main character with a depth that the Death Wish movies could never fully achieve. The vigilante's killings aren't the focus of the story, but rather the catalyst that forces him and those around them to question the meaning - and price - of true justice. A worthy sequel that manages to deliver the same dynamics of the first novel while adding a new dimension to the subject matter.

[bridgey_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The sequel to the excellent Death Wish. The first thing to point out is that this is not the same as the film sequel to the movie. Paul Benjamin has moved to Chicago, intent on making criminals pay for their deeds he purchases two guns and sets his traps to ensnare them.Things don’t turn out as well as he expected when a new woman in his life complicates his emotions and then a copycat vigilante starts to hurt innocent people. A quick read at just over 160 pages but an easy one and brings up a lot of interesting points.

[sidwilliams · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I bought and read a movie tie-in edition of Death Wish around the time the film was in theaters in '74, but I was unaware of the book sequel until I ran across the paperback edition of 1975's Death Sentence on a display rack in a department store. This must have been '76 or so.I picked it up because I'd liked the first and had read interviews with Brian Garfield by then about his disillusionment with the film version. I was too young yet to appreciate his point.But he stated he'd seen his protagonist, Paul Benjamin, as disturbed, not quite the gunslinger hero Charles Bronson played as Paul Kersey.I've read initially a film adaptation was planned with Jack Lemon in the lead, which probably would have been closer to the book.By the beginning of Death Sentence Benjamin has made his way to Chicago following the death of his daughter who was traumatized in the events of the first novel.He picks up where he left off in his vigilante ways, targeting street toughs in the midst of preying on school girls and other dark characters, but soon a love affair begins to refocus Benjamin.There's a sense that the book is a bit of atonement from Garfield who was disturbed by the movie's glorification of the protagonist's activities. In an interviews around the time of the film, he talked about the real life slashed convertible roof that made him think of striking back but that action vs. fantasy are two different things. He'd been to a friend's in Manhattan and came out to find his roof in ribbons, and that made him angry enough to want to hunt the culprit in the moment. He turned the feeling into the novel.The Chicago cop chasing Benjamin's vigilante expresses similar thoughts on deed vs. fantasy down to the slashed car top in a TV interview in the novel, and soon the plotline begins to focus on the dangers of Benjamin's ways.A copycat a tad more wanton and a tad less introspective begins to work the streets as well. Benjamin's mission turns from hunting down street denizens to dealing with his doppelgänger, and the story begins to move toward an inevitable showdown.I actually found this novel a little more engaging than the first, and it has interesting moments focused on Benjamin's pragmatic planning from acquiring weapons to doing things like smearing grease on license plates to obscure the numbers.It's thematic texture, while perhaps a little more heavy handed, makes it a layered and thoughtful thriller. A bit of that theme about the impact of revenge on the avenger is perhaps the common element between the book and the 2007 James Wan film adaptation with Kevin Bacon which otherwise creates a whole new story of a father tracking down gang members who've put his son in a coma.One point that stood out for me in the book was that Benjamin purchased and was shown how to use a Centennial revolver with a safety grip in the handle. My dad actually owned a gun like that, so it helped me understand what the book was talking about.All in all it's a good read and a good entry in Garfield's output of '70s thrillers which included Hopscotch and Recoil.