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Crying Wolf is one of those Peter Abrahams campus-thriller novels that works because of how slowly he sets up the catastrophe. Nat is a scholarship freshman at a New England liberal arts college. His new friends are a wealthy twin brother and sister who have a certain confidence with money and a certain comfort with the idea that the world arranges itself to suit them. The three of them stage a fake kidnapping of one of the twins, intending to extract money from the family. It goes wrong in stages.
Abrahams handles the slow class-dynamic shift with the patience the form requires. The reader watches Nat understand, far too late, what the twins are actually like. The kidnapping plot resolves with the kind of moral mess that the campus-thriller form usually pretties up.
Four stars. One of the underrated late-90s American thrillers. Recommended to readers who like their suspense slow.
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