Crying Wolf

January 31, 2000
Edgar nominee Abrahams (Lights Out; A Perfect Crime) returns with a suspense novel built around kidnapping, extortion and youthful stupidity. Nat is the eager, sports-loving valedictorian of his small-town Colorado high school. With his $2,000 prize in an essay contest, he can just barely afford to enroll at Inverness, an elite New England college. There he meets Grace and Izzie Zorn, twins from a wealthy Manhattan family, who bring Nat home with them for the Christmas holiday and show him tall buildings, fine wines and decadent parties. Meanwhile, a steroid-pumped, speed-freak criminal named Freedy flees his job cleaning swimming pools in L.A. after a botched rape and assault. Heading home to Inverness to live off his perpetually stoned mother, he discovers his next source of income: technological appliances from the college. Freedy begins ripping them off and fencing them to a local hood, using a network of tunnels beneath the school to get in and out. Nearly stumbling into Freedy one night, Nat and the girls discover a hidden room full of old books and booze, which becomes their hideaway. When Nat's mother is fired from her job, Nat fears he'll have to drop out of Inverness, so the girls (both have slept with him by now) plot to stage their own kidnapping, earmarking the "ransom" for Nat's tuition. Mr. Zorn quickly thwarts their plan, but Freedy, who has been spying on Nat and the girls' secret meetings, hatches his own, far more dangerous, kidnapping scam. Now, when the situation is serious, Nat's vain pleas for help give the novel its name. Abrahams's plot moves too slowly to please readers looking for danger, verve and action, and his characters are too crudely drawn to succeed as examples of dissolute late-adolescent elites. With his foul language and his 'roid and meth-driven delusions of grandeur, Freedy makes for an interesting villain, but his rages can't sustain the book. Nat remains too naive for too long, his girlfriends are two-dimensional and a distracting subplot (involving Nat's philosophy professor, Mr. Zorn and Freedy's mother) is left unresolved.

November 1, 1999
In Abrahams's latest, some desperate young men are setting up a deserving victim (he's a bullying billionaire)--with unforeseen consequences.

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2000
College is an expansive experience for Nat, a small-town boy from Colorado, not just because he's enrolled at prestigious Inverness College in New England but also because he meets wealthy, beautiful twins, Grace and Izzie. He joins them for the Christmas holiday at their New York penthouse and a secluded Caribbean island, increasingly seduced by their privileged lifestyle. He wards off Grace's unwanted attentions in favor of Izzie and settles into a secretive relationship that feeds into the twins' troubled rivalry. When Nat's mother loses her job, he faces the threat of leaving Inverness and losing Izzie. The twins devise a fake kidnapping plot, a "victimless" crime with one of them as the kidnapping subject, to get the money from an indifferent father. Is Nat ambitious enough to overcome mundane, middle-class values to achieve the freedom of wealth, however ill-gotten? Nat reluctantly goes along and finds himself caught in real-life moral dilemmas to rival those of their philosophy class--" Superman and Man: Nietzsche and Cobain" --taught by Professor Uzig, a man with his own failings and unsavory secrets. A parallel story of the homecoming of an Inverness native son from the wrong side of the tracks brings Freedy, as ambitious as Nat but with none of the moral trappings, into the vaunted atmosphere of the college. Freedy, a Superman in his own estimation, is on the run from an attempted rape charge in California and looking for an easy score to finance his ambitions: a kidnapping is just the ticket. Abrahams ably builds suspense in this novel about secret lives, madness, and mistrust. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)