The Scapegoat

A mesmerizing postmodern debut novel, The Scapegoat is a propulsive and destabilizing literary mystery that follows a man at a university in the San Francisco Bay area as he investigates his father's deathN is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father—unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. His investigation leads him to a hotel built over a former Spanish mission, a site with a dark power and secrets all its own. On campus, a chance meeting with a young doctor provokes uncomfortable feelings on the direction of his life, and N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful episode from his past.Meanwhile, a shadowy group of fringe academics surfaces in relation to his father's...