Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late 20th-century America returns to the emotional and geographical terrain of acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates’s previous bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two “primary suspects”, her estranged husband Delray Kruller and her longtime lover Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers’ son Aaron and Eddy Diehl’s daughter Krista become obsessed with one another, each believing the other’s father is guilty. Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is a classic Oates novel in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel’s end, the “fated lovers”, m