In Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead, we see Robert Blecker and Daryl Holton meet during Blecker's 2005 research trip to Riverbend maximum-security prison outside Nashville. While chatting with Holton in an impromptu interview, Blecker discovers to his shock that this multiple murderer not only possesses a keen legal mind and a wry sense of humor, but that Holton has declined to file any of his permitted appeals, and seems to invite his own execution with a mixture of calm and even courage. The two men discover a strange philosophical kinship.

So begins this puzzling and engrossing relationship. For the next year and a half - by phone, by mail and even the occasional visit - the condemned man and the scholar warily spar with one another through a roller-coaster of death-watches, postponements and court-ordered stays, all the while exploring together the meaning of mercy, justice and the morality of the death penalty.