The Fountain in the Forest

When a brutally murdered man is found hanging in a London theatre, Detective Sergeant Rex King becomes obsessed with the case. Who is this anonymous corpse, and why has he been ritually mutilated? As Rex digs deeper into the crime scene, the investigation begins to unravel, refusing the logic of a conventional murder inquiry.

Clues fracture into symbols, witnesses contradict themselves, and the case starts to mirror Rex's own buried past. The search for the victim's identity becomes inseparable from a more troubling question: who, beneath the certainty of his badge and rank, is Rex King himself?

Shifting between Holborn Police Station, an abandoned village in rural 1980s France, and the violent clash between state power and counterculture at Stonehenge's Battle of the Beanfield, The Fountain in the Forest reimagines the crime novel as something stranger and more daring. At once a gripping police procedural, an avant-garde experiment in language, and a philosophical meditation on liberty and identity, it is an iconoclastic novel of rare ambition.



Tony White is the author of six previous novels including The Fountain in the Forest and Foxy-T (both Faber & Faber) and Shackleton's Man Goes South (the first novel ever published by the Science Museum).

A former writer in residence at the Science Museum, he has reviewed for the Guardian, the Idler and Irish Times. He is currently a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund attached to Royal Holloway University of London, and an Associate Lecturer on the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck. He is a member of the Crime Writers' Association.