"Peter Abrahams, in his terrific 10th novel, "Crying Wolf," tells a riveting story of a time as menacing as any: the present.

Inverness, though, the small New England school where an out-of-state scholarship freshman named Nat tries to make his mark, seems idyllic: a frequent location site for filmmakers in need of an ideal college campus. The idyll grows stranger when Nat is befriended by Izzie and Grace, beautiful twins in whose wealthy milieu Nat is a fish out of water.

The twins hatch a scheme to solve Nat's money problems, an ill-conceived caper that turns ugly when it converges with the deluded plans of a drug-addled campus thief.

"Crying Wolf" unfolds brilliantly, in sequences made all the more compelling by nuance and precise detail. Mr. Abrahams captures all sorts of voices in all kinds of rooms: the razor-edged banter at the twins' family dinner table, the heady talk in the philosophy class of a Nietzsche-obsessed professor, the egoistic mental ramblings of a thief who recites infomercial babble like spiritual truth. A book as smart and gripping as "Crying Wolf" makes any year memorable."

"Crying Wolf is a suspense novelit says so right on the cover. In Steven King's blurb of praise, Peter Abrahams is his "favorite American suspense novelist." That should mean nail-biting action--what's lurking around that corner?--eerie coincidence, disturbing glances into the depths of human evil, right? Well, yes. But Abrahams's novel is also a remarkably sensitive examination of a naive young man's emergence from an insular environment into a world more disorienting than he'd ever thought college could be.

Nat is an enormously likable protagonist. His decision to leave his small hometown in Colorado to attend Inverness College, an equally small but very prestigious liberal arts institution, will force him to question attitudes and ways of life he had always taken for granted. But such novelty can be disturbing as well as rewarding: when he meets fellow students Grace and Izzie Zorn, a pair of twins born with any number of silver spoons in their identically lovely mouths, Nat must struggle to reconcile their matter-of-fact acceptance of the omnipresence of money with his own frugal existence. Both dreamer and pragmatist, Nat immediately captures the reader's sympathy.

Abrahams frames Nat's growing awareness of the complexity of existence against the life and times of Freedy Knight, a thief, bodybuilder, and con artist for whom complexity means figuring out a method of acquiring both money and women. Freedy is Abrahams's masterpiece, and he plays with the convention of free indirect discourse to bring the reader right into Freedy's supremely self-satisfied and remarkably funny mind. After a stunning failure as a pool maintenance engineer in California--"Women liked brains, no getting around it. Brains meant sensitivity. For example, floating in the water near the filter was a little furry thing. 'Poor little fella,' you could say to some woman who happened to come by the pool. That was all it took: sensitivity. Combine that with the ripped part, the buff part, the diesel partthat bare-chested dude, wearing cut-offs and workboots, the skimmer held loose in his hands, was he himself, after all--and what did you have? The kind of dude women went crazy for, absolutely no denying that."--Freedy brings his arrogance and a powerful methamphetamine addiction back east. It's only a matter of time before his path and Nat's will cross."

"When Freedy (searching for dorm room goodies to fence) and the Inverness trio both stumble upon the underground rooms of a long-gone secret society, and when his mother's unemployment means that Nat can no longer afford to stay at Inverness, greed, nonchalance, and fear unite. The three students are on a collision course with a desperately charismatic criminal; the twins' well-intentioned plan to keep Nat at Inverness by staging a kidnapping for ransom will go horribly awry. Nothing bad was supposed to happen: they were only crying wolf. Unfortunately, sometimes the wolf is real."

It was more than a white lie. It was deception on a grand scale. But the motive was admirable--to save the bright future of a deserving young man. And the victim, too, was deserving--an arrogant billionaire who would hardly notice his loss, crumbs from a vast fortune. All the plotters needed was a believable story, desperate and frightening, but false. Nothing bad was supposed to happen. They were only crying wolf. But what if the wolf were real?