Ask a Bookseller: 'Penance' by Eliza Clark

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

October is around the corner, and with it spooky season. If you like to settle into fall on a diet of murder mysteries and true-crime documentaries, check out the novel "Penance" by Eliza Clark. That's the recommendation from Kate Stern of Antigone Books in Tucson, Ariz.

"Penance" is a fictional story, but it reads like a true-crime investigation with an unreliable-narrator journalist at the helm.

It's not a spoiler to say that the novel involves a grisly murder. Within the first pages, we learn that a teenage girl was burned alive by three female classmates on a beach in a small coastal English town called Crow-on-Sea.

The crime takes place on the night of Brexit and is therefore buried in the newscycle, to be later uncovered by true crime podcasts and Tumblr communities, whose comments and speculation are woven through the story.

Through the investigation, the murdered girl's story — and her previously uneventful life — grow less and less important as we delve into the potential motives of the murderers and the history of the odd town.

"It is an examination of the true crime industry," says Stern, who called the book a pageturner with excellent character development. Reading out to find out what exactly happened, we have to ask ourselves: Why do we want to know?