Is there redemption after murder?

In broad daylight, a young thug gunned down the mother of a girl he wanted to date because the mother didn’t want her daughter to be involved with him. His accomplice in the murder was another young woman. She was in love with him. In some pathetic, awful way she thought that if she helped him do it, he’d see that she was the one who loved him most, the one he ought to be with.

A case much like that happened a few years ago in DeKalb County. The thug got life in jail. The dead woman’s family was crushed. But it was the accomplice’s story, the young woman who at the end of the trial got off with time served and probation, that captivated novelist Terra Elan McVoy.

What could have led a young woman to participate in a scheme that would swiftly unravel and crush lives for years after? McVoy has imagined the answers in her fifth young adult novel, “Criminal” (Simon/Pulse). Just released, it has already received solid reviews including a starred review from Publishers’ Weekly.

» MORE: Read an excerpt from "Criminal"

McVoy, who lives with her husband just outside Decatur, was captivated by the case, its every development reported incessantly by news outlets. All of the elements seemed to be there: jealousy, deception, action, romance. But those are the elements of pot boilers. McVoy, 38, wanted to get at something deeper, something that explained a possible motive of someone who could easily be judged and dismissed as a nobody, a loser.

“What I ended up being interested in writing about was not that she was a killer, but that she was so in love that it makes her a killer,” McVoy said. “And what I was super interested in was, ‘How do you atone for that, make amends, grow forward and become a clean person?’ ”

A murder in a young adult novel is not new territory. The category has aged up certainly in the last decade with topics getting heavier and darker, not unlike the tone of the world teenagers actually live in. But McVoy’s first four novels reflected issues more typical of the teen years, from relationships between sisters, to adolescent love triangles and the fraught decision over whether to become sexually active.

How then to deal with a form of violence most kids won’t ever be touched by? Even though you describe the murder, make the crime itself recede. Amp up the emotional journey of the 18-year-old who is for all intents and purposes still a girl in the throes of figuring out who she is, and, more importantly, who she ought to be.

“One of the lawyers I interviewed for this book really helped because she talked about watching her clients go from denial over what they’ve done, to coming to grips with what they’d actually done then wanting to atone for it,” McVoy said. “You’re young and you make really big mistakes. Now don’t get me wrong. I was raised by Superman. I believe people ought to be brought to justice and be punished according to the law. But the point of this book for me was about understanding and compassion. Not excusing. Not absolving, but having compassion for people who make these really horrible, horrible mistakes.”

Anica Rissi has been the editor of all five of McVoy’s books. The two have been friends since they were editorial assistants together at Scholastic in New York City years ago. Rissi is from New York and McVoy is from Tallahassee, Fla. When they read manuscripts for young adult novels at Scholastic, McVoy was always bothered by what she saw as a pervasive point of view, Rissi said. Most of the stories were set in New York or Los Angeles and the characters were dealing with the problems of wealthy, materialistic teens in both locales. Or the characters were incredibly impoverished. Or they had an eating disorder.

“Terra was incredibly frustrated and she wanted to write about real girls from real places like where she’s from, girls who go to church and have normal family lives,” Rissi said. “We weren’t seeing a lot of that at the time.”

So McVoy set out to write about girls like that, beginning with her first novel, “Pure,” about the purity ring craze of a few years back. Subsequent books have been inspired by the personal (relationships with siblings) and the pop: “After the Kiss” (remember Brad/Jennifer/Angelina triangle, well think of that on a high school level). But if there has been a constant flaw in McVoy’s work, at least the early drafts of her novels, it’s that she is often too easy on her characters and perhaps has too much empathy for them, Rissi said.

“Terra could tell you what they’ll do for Thanksgiving, what they’ll eat, who their roommates will be in college,” Rissi said. “She knows everything about them. But I think the more you push the boundaries on the page, the greater the payoff for the reader. I kept telling her, ‘Take away the safety net of the characters and make them jump,’” Rissi said.

So the lead character in “Criminal,” Nikki, went from being the honest, forth-coming type, to someone more divided. The mountains of horrific abuse Nikki suffered as a child in early versions of the story were removed, but replaced by crippling loneliness and neglect. A minor character, Bird, became the book’s heart by its final draft. They are characters even middle aged adults can recognize.

Sydney Coleman, a 15-year-old DeKalb County high school junior and aspiring writer, was lucky enough to get McVoy to critique her writing earlier this year. McVoy often works with teenager through writing workshops specifically for youth. In McVoy’s critique of her work, which clocked in at 109,000 words by the way, Coleman saw some of the same empathy brought to the character Nikki, but also the same level of intense honesty.

“I would read ‘Criminal’ and say, ‘Why are you doing this?!’” Coleman said. “And I know people like that who feel like they have to do anything to keep someone in their life. But the more back story you got on her, the more things began to make sense. And it’s pretty easy to judge somebody when you don’t know what’s gone on in their past.”

McVoy has hit a groove with young adult writing, and has few plans, at least for now, to move away from it. In fact she’s tired of being asked the question of when will she move on to grown-up fiction. There is something about being a teen with all its attendant joys and hells, that keeps McVoy locked in. She has kept all of her diaries from high school. All she has to do is pick up a volume to be reminded of how searing every single emotion seemed to be at 16. And since she resigned her post as programming director for the AJC Decatur Book Festival last fall, she has more time now to focus on telling stories that relate to young people like Coleman.

“I feel a lot of respect for people going through that stage of life,” McVoy said. “Being 16 was the worst age of my life. It was a time of a lot of change that I wasn’t ready for. I had to create a whole new social circle. I started gaining weight in ways I didn’t understand. I had this really bad zit problem. It was like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not a cute little 14 year old. I’m this big galumping bluh!’”

She was in many ways a typical kid, with typical problems. The Nikki character was not. McVoy knew no one like her when she began writing her character. But the one thing Nikki does have in common with most teens is that her biggest struggle is with herself. It’s just that this character is coming to terms with the most heinous of acts.

Yet she is at the beginning of her life. There is the possibility of change, should she reach for it.