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WORK TITLE: Penitence
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WEBSITE: https://kristinkoval.com/
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PERSONAL
Married; children: two sons.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Georgetown University and Columbia Law School.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Attorney and writer. Former corporate lawyer for a firm in New York, NY, then trusts and estates lawyer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]Kristin Koval is a lawyer turned novelist whose concerns include forgiveness and justice. As a youth she attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a preparatory school in New Hampshire. After enrolling at Georgetown University and earning a degree from Columbia Law School, she started practicing corporate law at a major firm in New York City. The company-centric orientation left her feeling stifled; she told Neil Nyren of BookTrib, “It felt like I was dying a slow death at work every day.” She thus aptly switched to trusts and estates law, helping clients figure out their posthumous visions and wills. Still, she felt dissatisfied because the work suppressed her natural creative impulse. She explained to Nyren: “I’d spent my entire childhood buried in books or writing in journals, and as a lawyer I had no extra energy for creativity and the only time I got to read was on vacation. I knew I was letting something I’d always loved slip away, and started taking evening writing classes. It didn’t take long—in fact, it hit me when I was writing my very first short story—to realize I was passionate about writing in a way I was not about the law.”
Learning craft from novelists including Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Beth Keane, and—in a Catapult workshop she took—Lynn Steger Strong, Koval churned out the beginnings of three novels and one full draft manuscript that went unclaimed by agents. She drew on her profession in writing the novel that would ultimately become her debut, Penitence. Koval took inspiration from personal experiences with forgiveness and from an empathetic interest in cases of fratricide, and moreover she was piqued by problems with youth justice in the United States. About the research she conducted, she related to BookTrib‘s Nyren: “The most surprising thing I learned was how poorly the criminal justice system treats young people. Yes, the young people within that system are troubled, but the way we treat them only makes them more troubled, not less. … They’re rarely given a second chance to be a better person and make something of their lives and they’re certainly not given the tools to do so.” Koval continued, “While my original intent was to write about forgiveness on an individual level, I realized I couldn’t tell this story without also focusing on the lack of forgiveness within America’s criminal justice system.”
Penitence opens with thirteen-year-old Nora Sheehan shivering in a jail cell in Colorado; she has just shot and killed her older brother, Nico, who was afflicted with Huntington’s disease. Underlying this tragic act, as becomes apparent as Nora’s parents respond, is an interwoven web of strained relations and consequential acts. Mother Angie Sheehan’s life was changed forever at age seventeen when, while she and boyfriend Julian were minding her younger sister, Diana, a skiing accident caused Diana’s death. Only Julian, now a lawyer hobbled by alcoholism, knows the truth about that accident; only Angie knows how much she and Julian remained connected after their parents forced their separation. Angie married David, who is left to go knocking on Julian’s mother’s door when, with Nora poised to be tried as an adult, they desperately need legal assistance. The uncomfortable reunion brings everyone gradually closer to the truths of the past, with mystery lingering as to why Nora pulled the trigger.
A Kirkus Reviews writer affirmed that Koval probes her characters’ pasts “with sensitivity and insight” as she “takes readers on a journey into the sometimes-painful secrets they have kept from each other.” The reviewer lauded Penitence as an “engrossing, emotionally charged … intelligent, deftly crafted suspense debut.” In Booklist, Katie Pomeroy observed that Koval’s legal background “lends realism” to her take on “America’s broken criminal justice system,” while her prose “poignantly exposes what it takes to find forgiveness.” Washington Post reviewer Nicole Chung hailed the novel as “gripping and propulsive,” thanks largely to Koval’s “deft, evocative writing.” Rather than relying on twists and turns, Chung observed, Koval “cultivates suspense in the harrowing internal struggles of her characters, in moments of quiet, believable devastation and self-doubt.” Chung commended Penitence for reminding readers “how ruthlessly we often punish our own transgressions; how fragile and terrifying self-knowledge can be; how impossible it can seem to forgive, until the moment we do.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December, 2024, Katie Pomeroy, review of Penitence, p. 113.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2025, review of Penitence.
Washington Post, February 2, 2025, Nicole Chung, review of Penitence.
ONLINE
BookTrib, https://booktrib.com/ (January 31, 2025), Neil Nyren, “Murder, Secrets and the Long Road Back in Snowy Legal Novel.”
Kristin Koval website, https://kristinkoval.com (May 18, 2025).
Lighthouse Writers Workshop website, https://lighthousewriters.org/ (March 13, 2025), Megan Burns, “Lit Fest Reads: A Q&A with Kristin Koval, Author of Penitence.”
Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and Park City, Utah with her husband, two sons and two Great Danes.
Lit Fest Reads: Kristin Koval
By: Megan Burns
March 13, 2025
The Lookout
Lit Fest Reads: A Q&A with Kristin Koval, Author of Penitence
Looking for your next captivating novel to read? Look no further! Lighthouse’s four-time Lit Fest alumna, Kristin Koval, recently published a stunning debut novel, Penitence, which was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick for February 2025, a People Magazine Best Book of the Week, and a Goodreads Hottest Debut of 2025, among many other recognitions. Her publishers recommend this addictive page turner for readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng. Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. The suspenseful novel is filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us.
We wanted to showcase Kristin’s success as Lit Fest approaches and connected with the author to ask some questions about her writing process. Read her responses here:
Tell me a bit about your experience at Lit Fest. What was the most memorable moment or something impactful that you learned?
I don’t think I can boil down my experience at Lit Fest into one moment. It’s a combination of experiences—of learning from both the teachers and the students in the Advanced Workshops, having the flexibility to branch out and take craft classes in poetry and nonfiction and screenwriting just for the sake of learning, making friends in the writing community that I may not see very often but with whom I share a passion, and having the opportunity to learn about the business side of writing—and doing all those things in just one short week or weekend. It’s invaluable!
The perspective shifts in Penitence really highlight the complicated process of forgiveness. What was it like for you to take on multiple points of view during the writing process?
When I began to write Penitence, I knew I couldn’t tackle the topic of forgiveness without multiple perspective narration. The characters are complicated (aren’t we all?) and I needed to position readers so forgiveness would be challenging yet attainable. Telling the story from Angie’s, Nora’s, Julian’s, and Martine’s perspectives prompts readers to step back from judgement and condemnation to understand the history underlying their often poor decisions. This hopefully leads to empathy and compassion, which are important precursors to mercy, and mercy is an important precursor to forgiveness—and that is where I wanted readers to land.
Do you have a word of advice for writers, whether they’re just getting started or publishing their work?
Never underestimate the power of community. Even though writing is often a solo endeavor, you need people in your writing life—as friends and teachers, and as sustenance when the going gets tough (as it does for everyone!).
Thank you for your insightful and thoughtful answers, Kristin! Lighthouse is so grateful to be one of the stepping stones along any writer’s literary journey. Want to dive into the suspenseful yet moving debut novel? Penitence is available for purchase now, so don’t miss out on this captivating piece.
Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. Her debut novel, Penitence, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick for February 2025, a People Magazine Best Book of the Week, a Book of the Month Pick, an Indie Next, an Apple Books Staff Pick, an Apple Audio Books Must Listen, a Goodreads Hottest Debut of 2025, and a Goodreads Most Anticipated Book for January 2025. Kristin is a devoted member of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop (and four-time alumna of Summer Lit Fest!), completed a twelve-month novel generator class at Catapult Publishing and is also an alumna of Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Aspen Summer Words. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and Park City, Utah, with her husband, two sons, and two great danes.
Penitence-Kristin-Koval-featured-art
Penitence by Kristin Koval
“Nora Sheehan sits in a jail cell in Lodgepole, Colorado, surrounded by three cinderblock walls and the kind of steel bars she’s only seen on television, gray and cold. She’s thirteen, the woman she might become still a shadow even though she’s ready to discard her childhood. A longing for her stuffed penguin – a gift on her fourth birthday from her older brother Nico – grips her with an intensity she doesn’t understand, and she twists her thin arms around her shoulders, a featherless bird warming herself with naked wings. She doesn’t look like the sort of girl who just shot her brother.”
In the first few pages of Kristin Koval’s Penitence, we meet many of its main characters: Nora, shivering in her cell; her mother, Angie, in shock, alone in her house; her husband, David, pounding on a controversial lawyer’s door in the pre-dawn hours; the lawyer, Martine, alone in bed, her husband dead, jolted awake; Martine’s son, Julian, a criminal defense lawyer in New York City, estranged from his mother and staring dumbfounded at the news on his phone; and Nico, the 14-year-old victim. Nico is in the morgue.
They are all interconnected, in ways they know and in ways they can not even imagine. Julian and Angie were inseparable in high school until Martine and Angie’s mother, Livia, broke them up after an unspeakable tragedy: the skiing death of Angie’s seven-year-old sister, Diana, while the two teenagers were supposed to be watching her. Angie is convinced Diana ran into a tree. Julian knows it’s worse than that. The reverberations carry on to the present, 25 years later: Julian’s drinking and work obsession; Angie’s failing marriage to David; Martine’s deep regrets about past actions; the mysteries of Nico and Nora.
What did happen on that day on the ski slope? Why did Nora shoot her brother once in the eye, twice in the chest, with David’s gun, then call 911 and turn herself in? What secret was Nico harboring that, in death, would turn their worlds upside down once again?
At one point, Julian marvels about “how quick that one moment in his life had happened, how each choice had led to the next, how they’d all gathered together, the weight accumulating and gathering force.” But as he flies back to Colorado to attempt the seemingly impossible job of defending Nora, he has no idea: The landslide isn’t over yet.
Spanning decades, Penitence is a novel about guilt and forgiveness, love and tragedy, about the cost of buried secrets and the fight for redemption. It’ll break your heart; it’ll lift you up. It’ll make you think deeply about the question: Does the worst thing we ever did define us?
Says the author, “I was inspired to write this story by my own powerful experiences with forgiveness, both being forgiven and forgiving other people. Over the course of several years, I’d seen numerous news reports of fratricide (and the concept is as old as time — Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, royal siblings in monarchies), and while it’s not common, there are more instances of it than people realize. Every time I read about it, my heart broke for the parents. I realized using fratricide as a starting point for a novel would give me the ability to write about forgiveness in a way that conveyed both its complexities and its rewards, because it placed the parents in both the hardest — and the easiest — possible position to forgive.
“We’ve all made mistakes, and although forgiveness is complicated, hard, and in the end, intensely personal, I hope readers of Penitence are inspired to give it a second chance in their own lives.”
Considerable research was needed, though: “Search engines are helpful, but after some basic research online, I reached out to actual people — legal and medical experts who were friends of friends of friends (sometimes I had to go deep to find those experts!). They directed me to textbooks, white papers, and other resources, and patiently answered my questions. I watched documentaries and read as many books as I could on the criminal justice system (Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy was a favorite) and eventually observed a criminal trial of an 11-year-old accused of assault and battery after hitting his teacher with a cloth lunch box.
“The most surprising thing I learned was how poorly the criminal justice system treats young people. Yes, the young people within that system are troubled, but the way we treat them only makes them more troubled, not less. Many states still have laws which require children who have committed certain crimes to be charged as adults, thereby subjecting them to inappropriate adult consequences. Scientific evidence has proven that our brains are not fully formed until we’re 25 years old, and yet we treat not just older teens but younger teens — 13, 14, 15 — as though the decisions they’ve made are fully indicative of the person they someday might become. And, by only applying the concepts of retribution, deterrence, and incapacitation, and effectively ignoring the possibility of rehabilitation and education, the criminal justice system is essentially throwing these children away. They’re rarely given a second chance to be a better person and make something of their lives and they’re certainly not given the tools to do so.
“Of course, this problem is magnified for some because of biases against children and young people who are black or brown, queer, or simply poor. While my original intent was to write about forgiveness on an individual level, I realized I couldn’t tell this story without also focusing on the lack of forgiveness within America’s criminal justice system.”
The story is a complicated one – many lives tightly intertwined, with key facts and revelations doled out strategically. It’s a tricky balance to pull off:
“I didn’t get it right the first time, but that was partly because I deliberately chose to ‘speed write’ the novel and get the story down on paper, and refine the details afterwards. When it was time to refine details, one of my strategies was to make a list of important facts and revelations, then read the entire manuscript and mark where each one occurred. I used a lot of colored highlighters and Post-its in that process! I noted how often a fact appeared and when, and then considered whether something was mentioned too frequently or too soon, because I didn’t want to overemphasize something for a reader and deprive them of the chance to decipher the puzzle on their own. And of course, I had the keen eye of my agent, Gail Hochman, and my editor, Deb Futter, to help.
“When I’m writing something, my mind is on the story all the time, and most of the time it’s on the details, not the bigger picture. When I think of something, I need to write it down immediately so I don’t forget it, and I have details written on Post-its, scraps of paper, emails to myself, and notes on my phone. (I also have a saint of a husband who stops and waits in the middle of a hike or a run while I make a note on my phone and who never complains when I turn the nightstand light back on immediately after going to bed to write on a Post-it.) I probably do more “writing” when I’m away from my laptop and my mind is wandering than when I’m at my laptop!”
Other writers helped, too, in a variety of ways:
“Different books influence me at different times, and often when I can’t figure out how to do something, I pick up a novel to read and end up learning the exact craft lesson I need to learn. For example, from Mary Beth Keane, I learned how to take my characters through blocks of time; from Barbara Kingsolver, I learned how to slow down the narrative in a way that excites the reader rather than boring them; from Lynn Steger Strong, I learned to pay attention to the middle of the novel. I also learn rhythm and creativity from songwriters and pacing from screenwriters when I’m watching television and movies.
“For much of my life, I’ve loved Latin American magical realism — authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende — but when I sit down to write, lyricism is not what ends up on the page! In fact, I’ve been told more than once that people appreciate my economy of words. I often speak plainly, and I love to use words in a precise and unusual way. The thesaurus is my best friend when I write, and I often search long and hard to make sure I’m saying what I want to say on the page. I was that geek of a child who read the dictionary for fun!”
Koval is herself a former lawyer, “who always wanted to be a writer, but initially wandered down other paths.” Here’s her story:
“I started my legal career as a corporate lawyer in a big New York City law firm — though that was a terrible match for me, and it felt like I was dying a slow death at work every day — but then retrained myself as a trusts and estates lawyer. Trusts and estates was a better match because I spent my time with actual people instead of corporations, listening to their stories about their families and lives, then figuring out how to accomplish their post-death goals in their estate planning documents. However, while I enjoyed the work and my clients and colleagues, I’d spent my entire childhood buried in books or writing in journals, and as a lawyer I had no extra energy for creativity and the only time I got to read was on vacation. I knew I was letting something I’d always loved slip away, and started taking evening writing classes. It didn’t take long — in fact, it hit me when I was writing my very first short story — to realize I was passionate about writing in a way I was not about the law.
“Walking away from an actual salary, my identity as a lawyer, and the people I felt committed to — both my clients and my colleagues, who I still miss — was hard, but not scary. What was scary was the possibility of waking up when I was eighty and saying to myself ‘I wish I would have tried.’ I didn’t want to live with that regret.”
Still, there were some bumps in the road before that passion paid off:
“Like most writers, I have a first novel sitting in an archived file on my laptop. I queried about fifty agents for that novel with some positive reactions but no takers before deciding it was time to move on to writing Penitence. And prior to that first novel, I had three different attempts that never resulted in a completed novel. (My most naive attempt was when I thought I’d have enough free time to write a novel while on maternity leave with my first child — but of course as a new mother I couldn’t even figure out how to make time for showers!)
“I wrote Penitence while taking a novel generator class with Lynn Steger Strong through Catapult (they’ve since discontinued their writing workshops). My first round of querying agents didn’t pan out, but when I sent my manuscript to Gail Hochman, she responded overnight with a long email, enthusiastic in her praise and with comments and suggestions that immediately made sense to me. We worked on revisions for about two months before sending it out to publishers on the Thursday night before a long weekend. Deb Futter bought it in a pre-empt overnight, which blew my mind. Gail had warned me it might be weeks before we heard back from anyone, especially since it was a holiday weekend, and the next morning when I saw that I had an email from Gail about the submissions, I assumed it was an immediate rejection and almost didn’t open the email because I wanted to avoid the bad news … but it was Deb’s offer!”
Koval is now at work on another novel, “still in the research phase, but since some of that research involves spending time on friends’ ranches, it’s fun!”
In the meantime, you’ll want to read this gem of a book. Unlike its characters, you’ll have no regrets.
About Kristin Koval:
Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and Park City, Utah with her husband, two sons and two Great Danes. (Photo by James P. Valin)
Koval, Kristin PENITENCE Celadon Books (Fiction None) $28.99 2, 18 ISBN: 9781250342997
A teenager's murder of her beloved sibling opens old family wounds and brings dark truths to light.
Death and complications define Angie Sheehan's life. At 17, she witnesses her younger sister, Diana, die in a ski accident that also injures her own boyfriend, Julian. She eventually leaves to become an artist in New York City, but just as her career begins to blossom, her father develops cancer and Angie moves back to Colorado to help run the family restaurant business and marries David, a law enforcement ranger for the National Park Service. A decade and a half later, she begins caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease, only to learn that her 14-year-old son, Nico, has juvenile Huntington's disease. Then one night, her quiet daughter, Nora, kills Nico with her father's gun. This tragedy sets off a series of life-altering events that include an uneasy reconnection with Julian. A successful criminal attorney now living in New York, Julian reluctantly returns to Colorado to help his lawyer mother defend Nora. Probing the memories of the main characters with sensitivity and insight, Koval takes readers on a journey into the sometimes-painful secrets they have kept from each other. Julian never tells Angie the degree of his involvement in her sister's death or how it drove him to alcoholism, just as Angie never tells Julian--or David--that she conceived Nico just as she left Julian for David. While exploring the complexities of personal and family relationships, this engrossing, emotionally charged novel also examines the way forgiveness comes from acceptance that "each one of us is more than the worst we've ever done."
An intelligent, deftly crafted suspense debut.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Koval, Kristin: PENITENCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A821608476/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b8a3782. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Penitence. By Kristin Koval. Feb. 2025. 320p. Macmillan/Celadon, $28.99 (9781250342997); e-book, $14.99 (9781250343000).
Koval's debut novel is a legal thriller set in Colorado, following the Sheehan family and the night that changed them forever. Nora Sheehan, 13, sits in a jail cell. Her older brother Nico is dead. Nora is the one who called 911--and pulled the trigger. Angie, their mother, blames her husband, David, for not securing the gun; Nora for using it to kill her own brother; and herself for not stopping it. When Nora faces the possibility of being charged as an adult for the crime and spending her life behind bars, David makes a desperate plea to Angie's ex-boyfriend Julian, a criminal defense lawyer known for his pro bono legal work. Despite his and Angie's painful history, Julian agrees to represent Nora. Fans of Little Fires Everywhere will appreciate this deeply moving novel about what it takes to let go of guilt and find redemption. Koval's background in law lends realism to her image of America's broken criminal justice system, and her prose poignantly exposes what it takes to find forgiveness.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Pomeroy, Katie. "Penitence." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 7-8, Dec. 2024, p. 113. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829740218/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=01aec2ee. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Gripping and propulsive, Kristin Koval's "Penitence" is an exploration of the struggles and impossible choices of two families linked by tragedy, guilt, blame and love. It opens with an act of incomprehensible violence: A 13-year-old girl, Nora Sheehan, shoots and kills her 14-year-old brother, Nico. As their small Colorado community reels in horror, shell-shocked parents Angie and David hire Martine Dumont, a local lawyer, to defend Nora. Martine soon convinces her son Julian - Angie's first love, now a criminal defense attorney in New York - to take the lead on the case.
Koval's deft, evocative writing avoids melodrama, and her novel does far more than propel readers from shock to shock. She draws especially vivid portraits of Angie, an artist whose younger sister, Diana, was killed in a skiing accident when Angie was a teenager; Julian, who takes on Nora's case partly due to long-standing guilt over his actions on the day Diana died; and Nora, lost and vulnerable in a way that makes her seem almost incapable of the violent act she committed. As the ambitious, "tough-on-crime" D.A. aggressively pursues the state's case against Nora, Angie and Julian must balance their responsibilities to her, their turmoil over seeing each other again and the burden of long-kept secrets.
"Penitence" reflects the reality that self-understanding can be as elusive as "justice": Nora insists that she cannot remember the night she killed her terminally ill brother, eventually admitting that she doesn't want to remember: For her, "the only way to go on, the only way to survive, was to forget." In scenes retreading Angie and Julian's intense, ultimately doomed relationship, we come to understand that they have also survived by trying to leave not only their former love, but their former selves, in the past. Their time together in New York makes for less riveting reading than Nora's case in the present day. Yet in their slow unraveling, as in Nora's own, we confront the corrosive nature of guilt and shame - how these things can live in us, damaging our self-perception and eroding our strongest bonds.
Those expecting a heart-pounding legal thriller won't find many sudden twists or turns, which feels appropriate, for no shock could compete with the horror of Nico's death. Instead, Koval cultivates suspense in the harrowing internal struggles of her characters, in moments of quiet, believable devastation and self-doubt. She patiently reveals and explores the pain they have long been harboring; the wounds that can never fully close; the unanswerable questions that haunt them. Angie, who has now seen two generations of her family shattered by the loss of a child, struggles to face or forgive Nora: "I don't know how I'm supposed to feel, what a good mother is supposed to do. Does choosing to support one of them mean I've betrayed the other?"
While grappling with Nico's death, Angie, Nora and Julian must also try to grasp the truth about themselves. At one of their meetings, Julian tries to tell his young client that she is "more than the worst thing [she's] ever done." If this sounds familiar - earlier in the book, Koval gives a similar line, borrowed from Bryan Stevenson's "Just Mercy" and quoted in the epigraph, to Julian's wife, Mayumi - it is also what Julian, still racked with guilt over Diana's death, needs to believe.
"You did a bad thing, but that doesn't make you a bad person," he says to Nora. "You need to become the person you want to be instead of the person who did the bad thing."
Bewildered, grieving, isolated from her family in a juvenile detention center, Nora asks: "And how am I supposed to find her in here?"
Koval's novel illustrates the brokenness of the criminal justice system, how incarcerated youth experience its cruelties, and the impossibility of delivering anything like justice to families like Nora's. Just as she can offer no real explanation for killing Nico, there is no way for her or anyone to make meaningful amends. No criminal proceeding will restore her brother or bring healing to her family.
In the absence of peace - or even the barest understanding of why Nora killed the brother she loved - "Penitence" invites readers to consider what kind of life may still be possible for Angie and David, for Julian, for Nora herself. Koval suggests that even in the face of the unforgivable, forgiveness is a choice, and sometimes we are the only ones who can extend ourselves the grace we need to go on. It's a message that could ring hollow but doesn't, because her book reminds us just how close a thing it is - how ruthlessly we often punish our own transgressions; how fragile and terrifying self-knowledge can be; how impossible it can seem to forgive, until the moment we do.
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Nicole Chung is the author of "A Living Remedy" and "All You Can Ever Know."
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Penitence
By Kristin Koval
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Chung, Nicole. "In 'Penitence,' a shocking crime sparks legal and emotional battles." Washington Post, 2 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825930823/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=375091dd. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.