Mark Bagshaw

Sally Dang at Satan's Gate Mark Bagshaw

When Jeffer Hartley's husband organizes his planned suicide to escape the pain of his illness, Jeffer is charged with murdering him and is sentenced to death by lethal injection as a consequence. Taken from her normal life as a college English professor, shut off from her family and friends, and stripped of her one-volume Works of Shakespeare, she arrives on death row-"Satan's Gate"-at the Miss Emily Hardcastle State Detention Center for Women, innocent of all charges and without a clue as to how to navigate her strange new environment. Before long, she has accreted a whole new set of acquaintances, including a self-effacing young Fundamentalist who has stomped her baby to death, an attractive Catholic mother who has conspired with her lover to run down her husband in the street as he staggered out of his local watering hole, an alcoholic bank robber who has gunned down two tellers at point-blank range for flirting with her robber boyfriend, and then there is fellow Shakespeare lover "Sally Dang," who has confessed to murdering her husband and her two teenage sons-because they "disrespected" her. In addition to the dangerous peculiarities of her fellow death-row inmates (DRIs), Jeffer must contend with the quirks and crankiness of the regular death-row corrections officers "Spiff" Spotfield, who makes up in aftershave what he lacks in manliness, and "Bunny" Taliaferro, who works just as hard at holding inmates to her own idea of high behavioral standards as she does at holding onto her own roving husband, at any cost. Just about the time Jeffer is beginning to understand how the prison works, and starts to see beyond the stereotypes and caricatures around her-even becoming serious friends with Sally Dang-she and all the hangers-on at Satan's Gate learn that life is about to change: the state has decreed that, beginning immediately, DRIs will be expected to start shuffling off this mortal coil at a faster clip than had previously been the case. What Miss Emily's DRIs and their Satan's Gate corrections officers will decide to do, in the face of such change, could not have been predicted.