A few friends have recommended that I read this book over the years. I'm glad I finally did.

It's a flawlessly told story of life inside the Death Row block of a penitentiary. There's ostensibly a mystery that's slowly revealed as the story progresses. But even though I've never read this book before, and never seen the movie in its entirety (just snippets here and there), the sheer weight of this story's success means you know who done what from the start.

There's still plenty of suspense, though, and loads of twists and turns. I absolutely loved it.

I was pretty sure I was going to give this book four stars, because of the formatting issues in my Kindle edition. I got the impression it was scanned in from a print version, and then someone was tasked with reading through it and fixing all the OCR software's mistakes. Only they missed quite a bit. It's the typical OCR stuff: mostly n, h, and b being confused, so you'd see the word "hoss" instead of "boss" for example.

Being tech-savvy, I immediately saw what probably happened... but sometimes, both possibilities are actually words, making the situation worse.

The last couple of chapters though... wow, those last few chapters are intense. Gut-wrenching. Incredibly emotional. With an ending like that, I'd be nothing more than a petty lugoon if I docked a star for some silly software issues!