Eliza Clark’s second novel charts a journalist’s investigation of a murder that slipped past the tabloid news hounds thanks to it taking place on the night of the UK’s EU Referendum. It is presented as a reissue of a true crime book that, at the time of first publication, was seen as contentious and withdrawn by the publisher. Its author, Alec Z Carelli, is a seasoned hack who formerly reported on crime for a left-wing tabloid.

I bought the book at an event with the author in the year it was published. In the intervening years, I had forgotten about its premise. There are parallels between Penance and Butter, the previous book I read, both in the premise (a journalist examining a crime to find a different angle to the contemporary reporting, or lack of in this instance) and in a shared theme (why some women and girls are prone to hating other women/girls). The journalist this time is a man. When we meet Carelli, he has had his career scuppered through his involvement in the phone hacking scandal and missed the boat on the popularity of true crime. His star is definitely on the wane.

Clark continues to write on the gritty side of literature. Penance isn’t quite as dark as her debut Boy Parts, but it travels similar ground in its depiction of the nihilism and cruelty of 21st century youth. The novel begins with a transcript from a podcast, the horribly named I Peed On Your Grave, discussing the crime in obnoxiously disrespectful terms. The three male hosts discuss how ‘hot’ one of the teenage girls who murdered a classmate might be, the sick humour stemming from the fact the the girl and her two friends set their victim alight after violently assaulting her.

Carelli encounters the story in a ‘chumbox’, a form of clickbait that entices visitors to a website to find out more about what they won’t believe, then does an internet search, listens to the podcast, and decides that taking a deeper look at the story and its aftermath will be the salvation of his career.

What follows is Carelli’s book, a fiction presented as fact within Clark’s wider fiction. We read the result of his research and interviews with people from the families of the victim, Joni, and her killers, Angelica, Violet and Dolly. It includes sections that Carelli introduces as prose adapted from interviews, blog posts and correspondence, formed from his interpretation of events. Fiction, in other words. I found it a strange reading experience, knowing it was fake but needing to suspend that knowledge in order for the novel to work.

While Clark has been inventive in creating this novel, it skirts a line between cynical and clichéd. The location of the crime is the fictional rundown coastal town of Crow-on-Sea, somewhere between Whitby and Scarborough, a place where the leading political family has long-standing fascist beliefs and where the vote to leave the EU was strong. The working class families in the town live mostly on a housing estate known as the Warrens. The wealthy families live outside the town, on the way to Whitby, in an area called Moorcock Hill. It’s simultaneously true and hyperreal. There’s also an amount of self-indulgence to the writing. In one example, Stirling-Stewart’s “nightclub owner, radio and television presenter and … philanthropist” friend Vance Diamond is obviously based on Jimmy Savile and his inclusion as a MacGuffin provides an opportunity for Clark to invent a ridiculous game show that added nothing to the story and felt like an in-joke for her mates.

Through his research, Carelli uncovers a typical story of school bullying, othering of people who don’t fit in, rejection of people who move to the town but don’t acknowledge the established social pecking order. His conversations with the parents of each of the girls involved draw the reader to a conclusion about how they have each been raised. The written material he obtains, illegally it’s suggested in the fictional publisher’s note at the start, from the girls who committed the crime creates an impression of callousness and self-absorption. He builds a picture of Gen-Z/Zoomer online culture in the 2010s, particularly tumblr and fandoms. Angelica’s written testimony in particular captures the peculiar pseudo American accent used by many from her generation. I could hear Angelica’s voice clearly. The fictional sections add to the picture of cliques and petty bullying, but also introduce the fascination held by Dolly and Violet for the crimes of serial killers. An interview with Violet’s English teacher develops this theme, with the teacher commenting, “I really didn’t think there was anything that abnormal about it. Teenagers are morbid, and a lot of them — particularly in recent years, with podcasts and stuff — a lot of them make being into serial killers their entire personality. I just thought it was an affectation — there are a lot of very functional adult women with the same affectation.”

The story travels along quite rapidly, with little about any of the characters to encourage sympathy. Everyone felt stretched to an extreme. The father of one of the killers, local UKIP politician Simon Stirling-Stewart, made me think of the far-right mayoral candidate Dennis Gimball in Slow Horses series 5 (I’ve yet to read Mick Herron’s books) – a confection of throwaway stereotypes that is simultaneously too close for comfort to the reality of far-right politicians in the UK. Two of the teenage killers are blandly nasty, their crime a casual accident in a brutal bout of bullying taken too far, underpinned by boredom with the world. It doesn’t even feel as though they were seeking notoriety, which makes it all the worse. Their victim isn’t much better, a bland bully herself in different ways. Which is not to say that she deserved her fate, but it was difficult to care about her as a person. But I think that, and the unlikeability of all the characters, is Clark’s point.

What’s really going on in the book is Clark critiquing the fascination people have always had with true crime, the separation of reality from sensation, and the industry that has grown up around it in this era of blogging and podcasting and social media. She’s questioning the reliability of true crime authors and their ability to share the facts without embellishment, knowing that their success hinges on the salacious interest of their readers. She’s exploring her generation’s addiction to a performative life lived online where everything is about appearance and rarely goes below the surface. She’s holding up a mirror to anyone who has picked up a true crime book, watched a tv programme, listened to a podcast, and felt more titillated than shocked.

I was interested in the critique of teenage interest in true crime, including its blending with horror and folklore, and how it has changed thanks to the availability of information on the internet. When I was a teenager, because of where I am from, our fascination was with the Moors Murderers. There was a paperback  copy of Emlyn Williams’s Beyond Belief that was passed around and read from at sleepovers. I didn’t know at the time that this was a fictionalised account. It was thrilling and disturbing, in the same way that ghost stories and horror were, and we grew out of it. I wonder what would have happened had we been teenagers now, whether all of us would have grown out of it. As an adult, I’ve only read four other true crime books, one of which is an influence on Clark’s book. I don’t have the interest in true crime that other people I know have, but I am a regular watcher of programmes like 24 Hours in Police Custody and Murder Trial, which I rationalise as an interest in seeing violent criminals being investigated and brought to justice. I read crime fiction as well, in particular police procedurals, for similar reasons. I thought Clark’s exploration, through her fictional journalist’s research, of how different a fascination for true crime can be for people of her generation was well done, even though some of the content towards the end, as Carelli turns to the fanfic written by the ringleader, Dolly, was incredibly disturbing.

At one point, I wrote in my notes for this review, “Perhaps if I hadn’t read it immediately after another book about a journalist examining a crime after the event that I enjoyed, and in which I liked the main character, I might have enjoyed Penance more.” Now that I’ve finished it, I know that it isn’t its proximity to reading Butter that meant I didn’t entirely enjoy it. It is a clever book but definitely not a book for everyone. Not even a book for me. All the way through I felt as though I wasn’t its target audience. Clark writes well, but I liked Penance less than her debut. Despite the glib one-liners, I felt it lacked the challenge of the humour in Boy Parts. Both books are bleak, but Boy Parts is irreverent and edgy, the voice of a new writer experimenting. Penance isn’t. It tackles a difficult subject, opens it up for wider observation, but offered nothing in the way of hope.

22/60 books to read in 2026

Read 04/04/2026-07/04/2026