"New York Times"-bestselling author Oates is back with this dark, wry, captivating tale, inspired by an unsolved true-crime mystery.

"New York Times"-bestselling author Oates is back with this dark, wry, captivating tale, inspired by an unsolved true-crime mystery.

Herein is the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family destroyed a decade ago by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder, part elegy for the lost Bliss and for his own lost childhood, Skyler's narrative is an alternately harrowing and corrosively funny exposé of upper-middle-class American pretensions--and an unexpectedly subtle and sympathetic exploration of those who dwell in "Tabloid Hell."