Saudi Arabia is one of the few states in the world with a high rate of executions for women.
Mr. Stayner's brother, Cary, is in San Quentin State Prison awaiting execution for killing four women in Yosemite National Park in 1999.
The hunt for the "dark fire" of the title, a petroleum-based WMD, forms the basis of the novel's quest, neatly aligned with a more human story, in which Shardlake obtains a stay of execution for a young woman accused of murder.
Previous executions of women have involved stoning or firing squads, mostly for adultery.
The latest execution for adultery of a women in Afghanistan, surrounded by cheering men is, I feel, the true picture of the world, apart from this teensy western corner of it with a kind-of-sort-of advancement in women's lives.
Although welcomed at first, even in some non-Pashtun areas, for their promise to restore order, their rule quickly became a miasma of public executions, mass arrests, and street beatings for women daring to show wrists or ankles, and for men whose beards fell short of the four-inch rulers that Taliban enforcers carried through the streets.
The decree freed tens of thousands of inmates on Sunday, including large numbers of men and women awaiting execution for alleged political crimes, as well as murderers and petty thieves.
The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li (Fourth Estate, £12.99) Yiyun Li's first novel, based on true events, lays bare the lives of ordinary people in Maoist China, as a young woman's execution for her loss of faith in communism sparks off a doomed protest in her provincial town.
Mr. Condon, who has been in office since 1994, has previously made headlines by advocating the use an "electric sofa," a metaphorical way to speed up executions, and prosecuting women for murder if their fetus died after they used illegal drugs.
Earlier this spring, film director Asghar Farhadi wrote an emotional open letter on behalf of a woman who faced execution for fatally stabbing a man who had tried to rape her.
