The scene where, in need of a car, she borrows one by gleefully blackmailing a man who recently raped her, is as discomfiting as it is hilarious. And then I was reading about Capote and how much of In Cold Blood was just fabricated and about how much fabrication was just an element of his career. True crime is a booming industry as new Netflix dramas, documentaries, and podcasts constantly drop, with the top earners – such as the podcasts My Favourite Murder and True Crime Obsessed – making millions each year.

Whereas most contemporary novels feel like variations on a few fashionable themes, Newcastle-born Clark seems oblivious to the latest metropolitan literary preoccupations.

But more and more people are questioning our appetite for these grisly tales, whether it’s OK to have a favourite serial killer, and the ethics of profiting from other people’s suffering and death. I really like Jon Ronson’s writing, I’ve read all his books multiple times, and part of it is I think they are just really interesting character studies of Jon Ronson. Penance ’s dark humour occupies a similar space, however, as do its keen observations on the edgier niches of internet culture in the mid-2010s, explored in passages that ricochet between the crime itself, the witch-hunting history of Crow, and the precarious landscapes of pre-censorship Tumblr and true crime message boards. It also depicts going to a bog standard British school very well, especially in terms of how different kinds of outsiders function and how difficult it can be for the "misfits" to actually get along when all they have in common is being different (Jayde's story in particular felt packed full of elements straight out of an actual school from that time, like assumptions about your family, being seen as one of the only gay teenagers, and being into sports but not in a cool way).

TW: One of the girls in Penance is obsessed with creating ‘pockets of hell’ – places to manifest and spread evil energy – which feels like a darkly comic parallel to post-Brexit Britain. Penance is a novel masquerading as a true crime book written by a disgraced journalist, exploring the murder of a sixteen year old by three other teenage girls in a run down seaside resort in North Yorkshire. Shortly after publication, several of Carelli’s interviewees publicly accused Carelli of misrepresenting and even fabricating some of the content of their interviews,” the text reads; the author also illegally acquired therapeutic writing by two of the incarcerated perpetrators. When they discover that one of their own has actually killed a girl, their sense of betrayal and disbelief is almost sweet to behold.The 29-year-old, recently named on Granta magazine’s prestigious once-a-decade roll of best young British novelists, suspects that was how she first encountered the horrifying case of Shanda Sharer, a US schoolgirl tortured and burned alive by four teenagers in 1992, two years before the author was born.

It's been nearly a decade since the horrifying murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson rocked Crow-on-Sea, and the events of that terrible night are now being published for the first time. And it is packed full of little details that make it all come together (for example, one of the girls has a harmless blog where she's obsessed with musicals and Glee, rather than an edgy blog about death or killers).

Over the course of his book, Carelli tracks down Joan’s family and friends, and builds a compelling picture of what happened – and why. So much for Penance’s narrator; but what of its reader, engrossed by his uncannily realistic account of human misery? penance' is a journalist's account of the gruesome murder of sixteen-year-old joni, which occured on the eve of the brexit vote, in a northern english seaside town, at the hands of three teenage girls.