Fox by Joyce Carol Oates (I gave it one star)

 Few authors plunge into the darker recesses of human nature with as much skill and intensity as Joyce Carol Oates, in her  forthcoming novel, Fox, scheduled for release on June 17. Billed as her first murder mystery, Fox is about Francis Fox, a charismatic middle school English teacher at a private, elite school in Wieland, New Jersey, who ends up dead in an apparent single-car wreck.

Readers should be prepared to be shocked by the dirty deeds of Fox who lures young girls into his den, er, his office in the basement of the school. His shocking manipulations of the select seventh and eighth graders in his four classes are not for the faint. Little is spared in the descriptions of what he does to the girls who he first drugs.

Detective Howard Zenger is charged with solving the circumstances surrounding the death of Fox. Methodically he pieces together the clues that lead up to what happened not only to Fox but to his students. The girls seem not to fear Fox but rather seek his adoration. None tell their parents they are being abused because Fox has brainwashed them into thinking he loves them.

Oates seems to be creating her own Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) story rather than a murder mystery. Overall, in a blurb comparing Fox to Tom Ripley, a fascinating character who lives long in the mind of readers, Fox is found to be lacking. This is a story you must choose to push through or you throw up your hands and mark it DNF.

Joyce Carol Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published 60 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She also writes under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. She lives in New Jersey.