You don’t have to believe in ghosts for the dead to haunt you.
You don’t have to be a murderer to be guilty.
Within six months of Pen Sheppard starting university, three of her new friends are dead. Only Pen knows the reason why.
With a sell like that, it was always inevitable that I’d read this and I’m just grateful to NetGalley for sending me a digital copy in advance of publication in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
In this debut novel we meet Pen as she is heading to university to start a law degree. She is on a scholarship, and we know her background is quite different to that of many of her peers. University offers the perfect opportunity to start anew and reinvent yourself. This is important for Pen as we know she has a secret, one that she doesn’t want anyone to know. We don’t know what that secret is, but we’re told it involved murder.
Pen Sheppard is one of those narrators that you simply cannot trust. She manipulates the truth to suit whoever she is talking to, and there’s a definite sense that she is also lying to herself. Her voice is intimate, and draws us in before spitting us out at the moment it suits her to!
Clifford recreates the heady excitement of first year university life in detail, and we watch as Pen befriends a number of characters. Some become friends; others seem to fulfil a function in Pen’s story (though quite what this is doesn’t become clear until Pen chooses for it to).
Knowing from quite early on that Pen is recounting these events to her psychiatrist made me quite mistrusting of her. Learning that Pen has been questioned by the police as a 15 year old for her involvement in the shooting of a policeman, and that she got off though many in her hometown are still convinced of her guilt, means we are never entirely sure what truth we are being told.
This novel twists and turns, and I found myself gripped by the unfolding events.
As Pen’s friends are injured and killed I was second-guessing exactly what had happened. Just as I thought I’d made a link, Clifford had Pen drop in another detail that alters our interpretation of events yet again.
I loved the moment when Frank, her psychiatrist, talks of how convenient it is for Pen that she has ‘all these perfect strangers’ come into her life at just the right moment. The comment encapsulated Pen’s attitude to people, and her detachment.
This is a book that will stay with me, and I’m certain that on reading it again there will be details I’ll notice that will alter my response. Highly recommended.
