NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “enthralling” ( Los Angeles Times ) and “remarkably engrossing” ( The
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice) novel of literary and psychological suspense
about the dark secrets that surface after the shocking disappearance of a charismatic
mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school—by legendary author Joyce Carol Oates “Eerie
shocking provoking and beautifully written.”—Gillian Flynn “I found it mesmerizing front to
back.”—Michael Connelly “I can’t remember the last time I read something so (darkly
disconcertingly) addictive.”—Rebecca Makkai “An extraordinary novel . . . unlike any other
mystery I’ve read.”—Joseph Finder “Tom Ripley eat your heart out.”—NPR “A classic
psychological suspense.”— People “A dark daring plunge into literary suspense . . . Oates
dissects the predator-prey dynamic with merciless precision.”— The Seattle Times AN
ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR) A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times The
Boston Globe Seattle Times Vulture Esquire Publishers Weekly Lit Hub AV Club AARP Who
is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy Fox beguiles
many of his students their parents and his colleagues at the elite boarding school while
leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two
brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an
unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods the entire community including Detective
Horace Zwender and his deputy begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he
might really be. A hypnotic galloping tale of crime and complicity revenge and restitution
victim vs. predator Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human
psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A
character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s
Humbert Humbert Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him until at last
he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate sweeping style and
interweaving multiple points of view Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry a novel
as profound as it is propulsive as moving as it is full of mystery.
