FOX

Oates continues to explore the dark side in this moody, often shocking mystery.

Francis Fox doesn’t enter the narrative until five dozen pages in, and when he does we find him in a sickening act: Deep-kissing a 12-year-old girl, “of which Little Kitten will never speak to others.” Little Kitten is but one of Fox’s victims, and he’s in a perfect position to recruit more: Having been caught in the act in another state, he has changed his name and moved to a small town in the woods of south New Jersey, Oates’ fictional terroir, and has resumed his revolting avocation as a middle school teacher. But as the story opens, Fox is perhaps no more: The denizens of and visitors to Wieland Pond—a forbidding swamp, “a wilderness in which cell phones are useless”—have noticed an unusual stench in a place full of them, as well as a rolled-over car and body parts. Lacking the means to quickly identify the victim, whose face is missing from its detached head, the local gendarmerie takes its time, with world-weary detective Horace Zwender slowly piecing together enough evidence of Fox’s crimes to think, “No one more deserving of being dead.” Meanwhile, suspicion of murder falls on members of the rough-and-ready Healy family, one of whose ancestors is rumored to have shot down the Hindenburg, and one of whose present members is among Fox’s targets. Oates’ descriptions of Fox’s acts are stomach-turningly graphic but not prurient, as if to emphasize how a dangerous predator can move freely in an unending field of prey. But in the end she delivers a tautly wound procedural, elegantly written (and with a Nabokovian in-joke that joins Lolita to her tale), with an expertly constructed surprise ending.

It’s not for the squeamish, but Oates once again masterfully limns the worse angels of our nature.