Publisher Description
‘Chilling’ FINANCIAL TIMES
‘Tom Ripley, eat your heart out’ NPR
‘Eerie, shocking, provoking’ GILLIAN FLYNN
A chilling, captivating novel about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charming, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school.
Who is Francis Fox?
A charismatic, young English teacher joins an elite New Jersey boarding school. Francis Fox quickly beguiles many of his students, their parents and his colleagues, while leaving others in the small town wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic.
When Fox disappears and parts of an unidentified body are discovered in nearby woods, the community begins to ask disturbing questions about the charming, mercurial teacher, and who he might really be.
A hypnotic tale of crime, complicity and revenge, Fox is an unsettling portrait of a cunning predator, which illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche.
‘Breathless and febrile … an utterly mesmeric account of how one man’s crimes can affect an entire community’ GUARDIAN
‘Impressive and unsettling’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘Rich in suspense, diabolical secrets and psychological insight’ ECONOMIST
‘Mesmerising … another masterclass from one of America's greatest writers’ MICHAEL CONNELLY, author of The Lincoln Lawyer
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024, she won the Raymond Chandler Award, a lifetime achievement honor given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This captivating whodunit from Oates (Butcher) dives into the twisted mind of a pedophile and the mystery behind his untimely death. Francis Fox, the charming new 30-something English teacher at Langhorne Academy in 2013 New Jersey, grooms his female middle school students by encouraging their writing before kissing and fondling them in his office during private meetings. His career began in Pennsylvania, where he quietly left a school after one of his victims died by suicide (the girl left behind evidence of their inappropriate relationship in her diary, but Francis's lawyer saved him with some dirty tricks). Steeled by quotes from Kierkegaard ("The crowd is a lie"; "The individual is the highest truth") and delusions of his virtue compared to Nabokov's "sick pervert" Humbert Humbert, Francis remains unrepentant. Over the course of the nonlinear narrative, in which a dismembered body discovered at a pond near Langhorne is eventually identified as Francis's, Oates gradually unravels the story of how Fox wound up at Langhorne and his body wound up at the pond. Francis's warped logic is as irresistible as Oates's wonderfully bizarre descriptions (in one scene, Francis strolls past seagull droppings that look to him "like leprosy or the acne of a brain beset by spurious notions of guilt not his own but foisted upon him by dwarf-souled others"). Oates is at the top of her game.
