Before that could happen, he wrote his own sequel. Lacking the the imagination for a title like Death Wish 2, he called it Death Sentence.

This one finds Paul Benjamin in Chicago, not really trying to start a new life but continue his old life in a different city. He still goes out hunting for criminals to kill and he still feels fearful and nauseous, with sweaty hands, every time.

Of course Chicago offers plenty of opportunities. Once Paul's activities become news, other citizens start to arm themselves and strike back. And then there's a copy-cat vigilante, another lone gunman like Paul, operating on a parallel track. The police don't know if it's a second vigilante or one vigilante with two different guns, but Paul knows.

Garfield alternates extremely effective writing from Paul's point of view with less convincing expository sections that are presented as newspaper articles nad TV news broadcasts.

There's a love interest, a woman who works as a prosecutor for the DA's office. Also in the mix is her mentor, a retired law professor who has strong opinions about the justice system. Both of these characters allow Garfield to shoe-horn some political philosophizing into the book but the real story is violence as a kind of infectious disease with Paul as one of many carriers.

While his actions aren't portrayed as a positive example to follow, the environment itself is, as it was in the Death Wish, a hellish, hopeless jungle of near constant brutality and sadism. When Paul is tagged quite accurately as demonstrating "violent solipsism" the phrase describes a social problem as much as it describes the individual.

It's a well written and page-turning thriller, much better than the movies Garfield's work spawned.

The first line is "The guns pointed in every direction".