Fox

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. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)