Description: This is a riveting narrative that tells the intertwined stories of seven death row convicts at Virginia's Mecklenburg Correctional Center from 1983-1995. The chief protagonist is Dennis Stockton, who is arrested on a murder rap, poorly defended, then convicted and sentenced to death. He steadfastly maintains his innocence, to no avail. Mecklenburg is believed by its wardens and guards to be an escape-proof prison, and this illusion of impregnability makes it particularly vulnerable to the ingenious escape plan the prisoners devise. Despite his role in the planning, Stockton decides not to flee, because he's fallen out with his fellow inmates and because he believes that his innocence will one day be established and he'll go free without adding another felony to his record. The escape is a dazzling set piece of suspense, as the Mecklenburg Six stage a monumental bluff and drive a prison van into the night. Soon after the escape, Stockton begins sending his diaries to a reporter who investigates his claims of rampant corruption at Mecklenburg and his own innocence. While the narrative is written in the third person, these writings by Stockton afford the authors -- and readers -- an astonishingly close-up view of life on death row, right up to the heart-wrenching moment of Stockton's execution.

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