A spellbinding novel of literary and psychological suspense about the dark secrets that surface following the shocking disappearance of a charismatic, mercurial teacher at an elite boarding school

“Joyce Carol Oates is simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I’m concerned.”—Gillian Flynn

“It’s hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as [Oates], who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers.”—The New York Times

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 prestigious 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, everyone in the community, including Detective Zwender and his deputy, begin to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he really might 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 deserves. A character as magnetically diabolical as Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly all around him, until at last he meets the one person 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.