Oates, Joyce Carol

Xavier Kilgarven has three baffling cases in his upper New York state 19th-century home, all of which are failures.

When a young girl disappears near a community in the Adirondacks, the people of the town of Carthage must face the fact that an Iraq War veteran is the prime suspect

Maurice Halleck, Director of the Commission for the Ministry of Justice, is accused of wrongdoing and then dies in a suspicious car accident. A suicide note and confession are found. But are they legitimate, or was he coerced into writing them before he was taken out to be killed?

Kasch is a lonely eccentric man in his forties who has survived a bitterly disappointing marriage only to fall in love, against his will, with a fourteen-year-old named Laney. An inhabitant of a distant, improverished region, Childwold, Laney embodies all that Kasch finds fatally irresistible. As Kasch succumbs to the beauty and mystery of Childwold and Laney's family, his control over his destiny loosens and he is plunged into personal catastrophe, even as Laney and her family are freed.

A wealthy and notorious clan, The Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir.

M.R. Neukirchen--the first female president of a lauded Ivy League institution--struggles to hold onto her self-identity in the face of personal and professional demons.