Penance

Author: Eliza Clark
Genre: Crime Fiction
336 pages
Publisher: Harper, 2023

Synopsis
On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.

Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.

But how much of the story is true?

Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.

My review
Penance by Eliza Clark is a brilliantly written, addictive work of crime fiction with a dark and unsettling core. Clark packs an extraordinary amount into the novel without ever making it feel dense or overloaded. Beneath the gripping, expertly told story lies a sharp critique of true-crime obsession, toxic internet culture, and the inherent dangers of subjectivity when attempting to tell an “objective” story. The result is a novel that is well researched, consistently intelligent, inventive, and endlessly intriguing.

At its heart, Penance unfolds as a grim, modern-day mean girls–style narrative, focused on the complexities of female adolescence. Clark examines in-school hierarchies, fractured friendships, bullying, jealousy, and the corrosive nature of toxic relationships with a clear and unflinching eye. Social media and online communities play a crucial role, both in the inset story of a brutal murder committed by a group of schoolgirls and in the novel’s framing narrative, reinforcing how digital spaces amplify cruelty, obsession, and misinformation.

The structure of the novel is one of its greatest strengths. Clark builds the story through the voice of an unreliable and morally compromised narrator: a washed-up journalist attempting to reinvent himself by capitalizing on the booming true-crime industry. The book is a work of fiction masquerading as a true-crime account, filtered through fandom, bias, selective sympathy, and the manipulation of so-called facts. In less capable hands, this format could easily have collapsed under its own ambition, but Clark executes it with remarkable control.

Carelli, the fictional author-narrator, is a particularly effective creation. He openly admits that Penance is a cynical attempt to cash in on the popularity of true crime fueled by podcasts and online communities. He is deeply suspect and emotionally distant from the crime, ignorant of the social realities he claims to interrogate, and willing to exploit even his daughter’s death by suicide to gain access and credibility. His blind spots around class, gender, and power are glaring, and Clark carefully uses them to expose the ethical failings of both the narrator and the genre itself.

Clark clearly understands the appeal and complexity of the true-crime genre. She convincingly captures everything from obsessive fandom and online theorizing to fanfiction and moral posturing. Throughout the novel, subtle breadcrumbs accumulate, gradually undermining Carelli’s authority and calling into question the validity of his facts.

There is a lot going on in Penance, and the narrative embraces multiple formats: podcast transcripts, first-person reflections, interview Q&As, and excerpts from online message boards. This layered approach reinforces the novel’s themes and kept me actively engaged in piecing together the truth.

My one criticism is that some sections detailing the town’s history, while interesting, were too long. A more streamlined approach might have resulted in an even tighter, sharper story.

Overall, Penance is a smart, unsettling, and thought-provoking novel that had me constantly trying to sort fact from fiction. True? Maybe. You be the judge.

My recommendation: definitely worth the read!