“Sara Davis’s The Scapegoat is a mystery novel in the way Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy or Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle are mystery novels: it’s an investigation of life, of thinking, of investigation itself. It’s impossible to anticipate and very, very hard to put down.”

—Paul LaFarge, author of The Night Ocean

“The Scapegoat is a delight—like a David Lynch movie, a Swedish detective novel, and The Shining combined, with not just an unreliable narrator but an unforgettable one. Sara Davis captures campus life and the ruthlessness of academia in a novel that is at once a chilling murder mystery, a witty academic noir, and a poignant exploration of an illegitimate son’s quest for parental recognition and love.”

—Rebecca Curtis, author of Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sara Davis, the daughter of two Stanford immunologists, grew up in Palo Alto, California, and received her BA and MFA at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing in New York City and Detroit. She lives in Shanghai, China. The Scapegoat is her first book. You can sign up for email updates here.

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