Fox by Joyce Carol Oates (4th Estate, £18.99)
In this hefty, immersive study of gullibility, complicity and betrayal, English teacher Francis Fox is a predator, all the more dangerous for being charming enough to beguile everyone from his adoring pupils to the teachers and parents at Langhorne Academy, the smart New Jersey boarding school where – aided by a change of name – he has obtained a post after leaving his previous job under a cloud. Fox chooses his victims carefully: his “little kittens”, all in his preferred 12-to-14 age group, have literary leanings and absent fathers, and feel validated by the attention he pays them. When the parts of Fox’s body that haven’t been consumed by wildlife are pulled out of a local swamp, it falls to world-weary detective Horace Zwender to work out what’s been going on. Peppered with exclamation marks, breathless and febrile, this is an utterly mesmeric account of how one man’s crimes can affect an entire community.
A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor (Hemlock, £20)
Taylor’s latest also centres on an educational establishment, Monkshill Park School for Girls, a crumbling mansion in Monmouthshire, Wales. It’s the end of the second world war, the country is exhausted, and several inhabitants are waiting for news of loved ones who are missing, perhaps dead. Also missing is teacher Annabel Warnock, who disappeared during the Easter holidays. It’s presumed that “Warnie” simply walked out on her job, but she remembers being shoved off a nearby cliff. Now a trapped spirit, she is determined to discover who killed her and, able to move about the school and grounds unobserved, finds herself privy to all sorts of secrets. Taylor’s ability to conjure time past is second to none and here he blends a school story for adults, a ghost story and a mystery for a sublime evocation of a closed world in which the adults are, in their way, as powerless as their young charges.
