The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle is a novel by the American writer Jodi Picoult, published in 2006 and her thirteenth.

The book is about what happens to a family when a fourteen-year-old girl says that her former boyfriend raped her at a party. Trixie Stone is the girl, and the story is told from three positions: hers, her father Daniel's and her mother Laura's. Daniel is a comic book artist who grew up in a violent household and has spent his life controlling the temper he inherited, and Laura is a college professor in the middle of an affair with one of her students, so neither of them can be relied on by the reader or by their daughter. When Trixie runs away to Alaska, Daniel follows her, and the novel uses the structure of Dante's Inferno, with panels from Daniel's own comic running through it, to organise the story of what a family does with the truth.

Picoult has written many novels about families in that kind of situation, and this one is told from three points of view so that each of them holds part of what happened.