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Second Nature
Obsession and depravity shatter suburban life and academia in this compelling double dose of psychological suspense, pairing two complete novels and two rare short stories, from six-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates. Perfect for readers of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Donna Tartt.
CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF PSEUDONYMOUS SUSPENSE FROM JOYCE CAROL OATES
Four decades ago, acclaimed literary author Joyce Carol Oates penned her first novel of psychological suspense under the name "Rosamond Smith." In the Smith books, Oates explored themes of betrayal and deception, lust and murder, through stories involving twins, doubles, and hidden second identities—initially, keeping her own double identity a secret.
Hard Case Crime is proud to bring these extraordinary works of crime fiction, long unavailable in bookstores, back into print in definitive double editions, each pairing two complete novels and two never-before-collected Oates short stories, all linked thematically, to weave a sinister web filled with dark reflections.
In This Volume...
A model suburban husband grows obsessed with a beautiful stranger in DOUBLE DELIGHT, while an eminent professor preys on a vulnerable student in NEMESIS – and the echoes continue in the rare short stories “A Girl Worth Twenty Million” and “First Death.”
CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF PSEUDONYMOUS SUSPENSE FROM JOYCE CAROL OATES
Four decades ago, acclaimed literary author Joyce Carol Oates penned her first novel of psychological suspense under the name "Rosamond Smith." In the Smith books, Oates explored themes of betrayal and deception, lust and murder, through stories involving twins, doubles, and hidden second identities—initially, keeping her own double identity a secret.
Hard Case Crime is proud to bring these extraordinary works of crime fiction, long unavailable in bookstores, back into print in definitive double editions, each pairing two complete novels and two never-before-collected Oates short stories, all linked thematically, to weave a sinister web filled with dark reflections.
In This Volume...
A model suburban husband grows obsessed with a beautiful stranger in DOUBLE DELIGHT, while an eminent professor preys on a vulnerable student in NEMESIS – and the echoes continue in the rare short stories “A Girl Worth Twenty Million” and “First Death.”
640 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 22, 2026
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates
863 books10.2k followersJoyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 25, 2026
Double Delight is a tour-de-force brilliantly executed and flawlessly delivered. It starts slowly like the first whispers of a storm, but step by step builds into a howling crescendo.
In “Double Delight,” we meet Terence Greene, executive director of a foundation during the week and husband and father on weekends. He came from an impoverished background, but married well to Phyllis and he is the chairman of a charitable foundation that supports up and coming artists with a never-ending piggyback of funds. When the jury summons comes, he is advised to get out of it, but he is determined to do his civic duty and lands on an assault case, mesmerized by the gypsy princess victim who had flowing skirts, numerous bracelets, and feathers in her hair.
He can’t take his eyes off Ava-Rose Renfrew, his Helen of Troy. And he becomes foreman of the jury and proceeds to sway them all in her favor against the ex-boyfriend who won’t leave her alone. And he drives by her house in Trenton and befriends her aunt and steps inside a swirling maelstrom. For now Terence has two families, one is bored with and one full of life and vigorous, accepting of his gifts that he is so eager to make out if foundation funds.
Oates shows us who Terence is – a philanderer, a perverted creep preying on young women, a murderer, a thief, but Oates tells the story through Terence’s point of view. So we get to see him as a victim, as prey, as a chump, a fool, and, despite what he does, we have this sense that we want to hold him back and stop him from being such a fool.
But he can’t save himself from his own foolish compulsions. He can’t stop himself. And perhaps he only deserves pity.
The novel (“Nemesis”) is approached from an entirely different angle than Double Delight. It is structured more as a modern suspense novel than as an old-fashioned noir. The setting is an elite music school, Forest Park Conservatory, and it is told from the point of view primarily of Maggie Blackburn, a tall, aloof, music teacher who is looked at as a mother-figure by Brendan Bauer, a slightly-built, unsophisticated new student who has come from the hinterlands of Boise, Idaho, to be bedazzled by the bright lights of big-time music schooling and the legends who teach there such as Rolfe Christensen. Brendan stutters and is shy.
Maggie, for her part, is thirty-four, unmarried, unattached, a gifted pianist who fatally lacked confidence in her abilities and had chosen to direct her energy into teaching. Maggie would secretly visit her father in the home nearly every weekend, but their meetings were not pleasant.
The set-up here occurs when at the beginning of the school year Maggie throws a cocktail party in her home and, at the end of the evening, Brendan is lured by Christensen to his home, obstensibly to hear music. But, “whether Bauer was a guest, a ‘freely consenting and active participant’ in what occurred, or a captive, ‘held against his will,’ ‘terrified into submission’ by force and threats against his life, would be a matter of debate.” The next morning Brendan appears at Maggie’s door, dazed, cringing, unfocused, appearing to have aged years, skin scraped raw in several places, bruised, with broken glasses, and reveals he was raped by Christensen. The poor Brendan is broken in body and spirit, humiliated beyond anything imaginable.
And then, as so often seems to happen to victims of sexual harrasment in college or in the workplace, the victim Brendan is humiliated and destroyed by the very process of seeking help. Maggie urges him to go to the hospital and the police and to not let this terrible monster get away with it. Brendan, however, ponders what should he care about others, noting that nobody cared about him, and blaming Maggie for inviting him to the cocktail party and not warning him: “You must have known! Why didn’t somebody warn me!”
But, dear friends, this first part is all but a set up for the murder that comes later in December of the same year and the question of who-done-it and is it who you think and why you think or is it someone else for other reasons. And by the time you reach the end of the novel, you realize that she’s done it again and presented you with yet another masterpiece of human thoughts and deeds.
In “Double Delight,” we meet Terence Greene, executive director of a foundation during the week and husband and father on weekends. He came from an impoverished background, but married well to Phyllis and he is the chairman of a charitable foundation that supports up and coming artists with a never-ending piggyback of funds. When the jury summons comes, he is advised to get out of it, but he is determined to do his civic duty and lands on an assault case, mesmerized by the gypsy princess victim who had flowing skirts, numerous bracelets, and feathers in her hair.
He can’t take his eyes off Ava-Rose Renfrew, his Helen of Troy. And he becomes foreman of the jury and proceeds to sway them all in her favor against the ex-boyfriend who won’t leave her alone. And he drives by her house in Trenton and befriends her aunt and steps inside a swirling maelstrom. For now Terence has two families, one is bored with and one full of life and vigorous, accepting of his gifts that he is so eager to make out if foundation funds.
Oates shows us who Terence is – a philanderer, a perverted creep preying on young women, a murderer, a thief, but Oates tells the story through Terence’s point of view. So we get to see him as a victim, as prey, as a chump, a fool, and, despite what he does, we have this sense that we want to hold him back and stop him from being such a fool.
But he can’t save himself from his own foolish compulsions. He can’t stop himself. And perhaps he only deserves pity.
The novel (“Nemesis”) is approached from an entirely different angle than Double Delight. It is structured more as a modern suspense novel than as an old-fashioned noir. The setting is an elite music school, Forest Park Conservatory, and it is told from the point of view primarily of Maggie Blackburn, a tall, aloof, music teacher who is looked at as a mother-figure by Brendan Bauer, a slightly-built, unsophisticated new student who has come from the hinterlands of Boise, Idaho, to be bedazzled by the bright lights of big-time music schooling and the legends who teach there such as Rolfe Christensen. Brendan stutters and is shy.
Maggie, for her part, is thirty-four, unmarried, unattached, a gifted pianist who fatally lacked confidence in her abilities and had chosen to direct her energy into teaching. Maggie would secretly visit her father in the home nearly every weekend, but their meetings were not pleasant.
The set-up here occurs when at the beginning of the school year Maggie throws a cocktail party in her home and, at the end of the evening, Brendan is lured by Christensen to his home, obstensibly to hear music. But, “whether Bauer was a guest, a ‘freely consenting and active participant’ in what occurred, or a captive, ‘held against his will,’ ‘terrified into submission’ by force and threats against his life, would be a matter of debate.” The next morning Brendan appears at Maggie’s door, dazed, cringing, unfocused, appearing to have aged years, skin scraped raw in several places, bruised, with broken glasses, and reveals he was raped by Christensen. The poor Brendan is broken in body and spirit, humiliated beyond anything imaginable.
And then, as so often seems to happen to victims of sexual harrasment in college or in the workplace, the victim Brendan is humiliated and destroyed by the very process of seeking help. Maggie urges him to go to the hospital and the police and to not let this terrible monster get away with it. Brendan, however, ponders what should he care about others, noting that nobody cared about him, and blaming Maggie for inviting him to the cocktail party and not warning him: “You must have known! Why didn’t somebody warn me!”
But, dear friends, this first part is all but a set up for the murder that comes later in December of the same year and the question of who-done-it and is it who you think and why you think or is it someone else for other reasons. And by the time you reach the end of the novel, you realize that she’s done it again and presented you with yet another masterpiece of human thoughts and deeds.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Excellent! "Second Nature" is a collection of two Joyce Carol Oates novels and two stories, published decades ago under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith.
The first novel, "Double Delight", is a page-turner that explores hidden personalities, reality vs. fantasy, obsessive love, masterfully written going backwards and forwards in time all with an overarching sense of dread. Oates does dread very well. And ambiguity. Is a murderer always a bad guy? What if he only kills bad people? Oates actually creates the portrait of a sympathetic serial killer.
Oates continues wtih the theme of ambiguity in the second novel, "Nemsis". Set in a music conservatory, an evil composer-in-residence is murdered with poisoned chocolates. A number of students and teachers at the conservatory have ample motive to kill him. Is it Maggie, the cool, blond pianist? Brendan, the victim of a sexual assault? Calvin, the conservatory head who's being blackmailed? Or a cellist who mysteriously disappears? It's like an old Agatha Christie who-done-it but with themes of sexual ambiguity, relationship ambiguity, and the mystery solved by an ordinary person.
Thank you Hard Case Crime for the ARC with the gorgeous cover!
The first novel, "Double Delight", is a page-turner that explores hidden personalities, reality vs. fantasy, obsessive love, masterfully written going backwards and forwards in time all with an overarching sense of dread. Oates does dread very well. And ambiguity. Is a murderer always a bad guy? What if he only kills bad people? Oates actually creates the portrait of a sympathetic serial killer.
Oates continues wtih the theme of ambiguity in the second novel, "Nemsis". Set in a music conservatory, an evil composer-in-residence is murdered with poisoned chocolates. A number of students and teachers at the conservatory have ample motive to kill him. Is it Maggie, the cool, blond pianist? Brendan, the victim of a sexual assault? Calvin, the conservatory head who's being blackmailed? Or a cellist who mysteriously disappears? It's like an old Agatha Christie who-done-it but with themes of sexual ambiguity, relationship ambiguity, and the mystery solved by an ordinary person.
Thank you Hard Case Crime for the ARC with the gorgeous cover!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews