The facile, baroque imagination of Joyce Carol Oates pays homage to the literary shadows of Edgar Allan Poe and Vladimir Nabokov, with nods to gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown and Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, in the astounding Fox. This novel is at once a psychological thriller, police procedural, and fair-play puzzler with the carbon footprint of a serial predator at its core.
That would be 41-year-old poet and English teacher Francis Harlan Fox, transformed from his identity as Frank Howard Farrell, who was accused of molesting students in Pennsylvania. Despite headmistress Paige Cady's vow not to hire "another (white) male" at the Langhorne Academy in Wieland, N.J., her niece's strong recommendation and Fox's ingratiating interview convince her to put the fox in the hen house. He endears himself to the girls with desk-drawer treats "dusted with a mere pinch of Ambien innocent-looking as powdered sugar." Langhorne Academy seems an ideal circumstance until Fox's pearly white 2011 Acura is found in Wieland Pond--but "animal activity" has rendered his remains unrecognizable. Is it an "accident, suicide or homicide"?
That's what Detective Horace Zwender must uncover. He believes a "serial pedophile is like a serial killer: hiding in plain sight," and finds a website Fox made "radioactive with felonious filth." Suspects proliferate. Oates's adept, diabolical manipulation of the onslaught of lurid details and incipient evil is both memorably mesmerizing and disturbing. Readers might suss out the murder weapon, if not the murderer, before Zwender. Oates finds a new way around an old genre, blending familiar tropes with her distinctive, well-wrought technique and measured stylistic rhythms. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic.