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Summary: Nietzche and college..
Review: Abrahams's "Crying Wolf" is the story of a college student with a feminine name who is just trying to be somebody. Life interferes, and he finds he has to make a few choices, fraught with folly. To help him are his friends, two sisters who are identical twins. The plan: fake a kidnapping, so the hero can stay in school. It was a noble plan, but someone decides to make it real to achieve his own ends. The villian is unusual, a dumb poolboy named after Nietzsche whose father never knew of his existence. Interesting themes, and operatic in tradegy.
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Summary: You will be crying if you lose this before finishing it
Review: Although parts of this book are predictable it is still an extremely enjoyable read. I will definitely look for more books by Abrahams in the future. The characters are very likable and interesting although Nat could have been given a male's name to avoid confusion at times. Buy this! Nat, male even though has a girl's name, is the pride of his small town, raised by his financially battling mother he obtains a partial scholarship to Inverness College but will have to work every spare minute of his time to be able to stay there. Not being able to afford to return home for Christmas, on route to campus security to report his dorm mate's stolen TV he witnesses two hot girls drop a fish tank. Lorenzo the Great's life is about to be cut short but Nat saves the day at the expense of some science lab brown fish. The two beautiful girls Izzie and Grace invite him to New York where he learns they are not only attractive but extremely wealthy as well. Meanwhile Freedy with the IQ of a rock is cleaning pools in California and thinks every woman he meets wants to sleep with him. He narrowly escapes a rape charge by fleeing back to his home town Inverness. Nat and the girls discover tunnels under the university with a hidden ballroom type place with a bed. There they plot a plan to make Nat's money problems go away but someone is watching who wants to start a pool company in Florida and sleep with Izzie and Grace.
Rating:
Summary: You will be crying if you lose this before finishing it
Review: Although parts of this book are predictable it is still an extremely enjoyable read. I will definitely look for more books by Abrahams in the future. The characters are very likable and interesting although Nat could have been given a male's name to avoid confusion at times. Buy this! Nat, male even though has a girl's name, is the pride of his small town, raised by his financially battling mother he obtains a partial scholarship to Inverness College but will have to work every spare minute of his time to be able to stay there. Not being able to afford to return home for Christmas, on route to campus security to report his dorm mate's stolen TV he witnesses two hot girls drop a fish tank. Lorenzo the Great's life is about to be cut short but Nat saves the day at the expense of some science lab brown fish. The two beautiful girls Izzie and Grace invite him to New York where he learns they are not only attractive but extremely wealthy as well. Meanwhile Freedy with the IQ of a rock is cleaning pools in California and thinks every woman he meets wants to sleep with him. He narrowly escapes a rape charge by fleeing back to his home town Inverness. Nat and the girls discover tunnels under the university with a hidden ballroom type place with a bed. There they plot a plan to make Nat's money problems go away but someone is watching who wants to start a pool company in Florida and sleep with Izzie and Grace.
Rating:
Summary: Crying Wolf
Review: Body>This book is a victim of the author's previous works. Once you've read other offerings, you come to expect dynamic chacterization, a rock-'em-sock-'em pace along with a surprises thrown in. Crying Wolf doesn't quite cut it in all areas. The characterization is there. First we meet Freedy, a swimming pool cleaner who just doesn't get it, an Abrahams' trademark. Freedy thinks he's smarter than he is; he thinks he's sexier than he is and in demand, and he doesn't understanding what the woman's (whose pool he's cleaning) problem is when he tries to have sex with her. On the other end of the spectum is Nat, the mid-west son of a single parent, basketball playing high school kid whose intelligence and essay wins him enough money to go to Inverness. While Freedy momentarily fades from the picture, Nat goes off to college. Because he can't afford to go home for Christmas, he must spend holiday on campus--until he meets the twins, Grace and Izzy. The twins, who are filthy rich, introduce Nat to a seductive new world he could not even begin to imagine. They take a jaunt to the Carribeans on the twins' family jet where Nat meets Leo Uzig, a philosophy professor at Inverness. From there, the plot thickens and the pace, which has faltered up to this point, picks up consideraly. Under the guidance of the professor, the twins and Nat become involved in a "harmless" plot that turns deadly very quickly.
Rating:
Summary: Feels rushed
Review: Have you ever seen a movie that felt like something was missing? Where you got the distinct feeling that something crucial was left on the cutting room floor? You may well get that same feeling with "Crying Wolf." The setup is fine; but everything comes together so quickly, it almost feels like Peter Abrahams was over budget and under pressure from a film studio to get this one in the can. Perhaps he was trying to create unrelenting suspense, which is an admirable tactic--but the end result just feels slightly unfinished and hurried as a result, as if his heart isn't really in it. "Crying Wolf" was OK, and it held my attention, but it left me feeling naggingly unsatisfied.
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Summary: Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . .
Review: I love it when I have no idea where a book is going, which in a case like this is only possible if you don't read the blurb on the dust jacket. Stephen King's recommendation of the author persuaded me that the trip would be worthwhile, and it certainly was. Interesting characters, nail-biting suspense, and clever parallels among very different people - some smart, some terminally stupid - as they attempt to put Nietzsche's philosophy into practical use. A winner!
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Summary: I couldn't put it down.
Review: I'd purchased "Crying Wolf" for a friend at work. Because he was out of the office and I'd run out of books, I borrowed this from his stack. I actually went to work half an hour early the day after I started reading it, so that I could finish the book before he came in to claim his prize. I was looking for the suspense since, on the cover, Stephen King is quoted as having said that Peter Abrahams is his "favorite American suspense novelist." I really didn't find suspense. However, I found a good plot with likeable characters. While this book takes place in college - a boarding school, if you will - I kept thinking that Inverness was NOT Hogwarts... Nat is a young man who wins a scholarship that takes him from his working-class town to Inverness College. Freedy is a young bodybuilder thug. Their paths parallel but never quite meet until... Nat happens upon Grace and Izzie, very rich twin sisters who attend Inverness (and very different from Patti, his hometown sweetheart). The three students hatch a kidnapping scheme to try to obtain some much-needed money from the girls' father. However, as we learned as children, if you Cry Wolf often enough, when a crisis emerges no one will believe you. While seldom actually "suspenseful," "Crying Wolf" was nonetheless a good book and a good purchase. I do recommend it; and I will be looking for more books by Peter Abrahams
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Summary: I couldn't put it down.
Review: I'd purchased "Crying Wolf" for a friend at work. Because he was out of the office and I'd run out of books, I borrowed this from his stack. I actually went to work half an hour early the day after I started reading it, so that I could finish the book before he came in to claim his prize. I was looking for the suspense since, on the cover, Stephen King is quoted as having said that Peter Abrahams is his "favorite American suspense novelist." I really didn't find suspense. However, I found a good plot with likeable characters. While this book takes place in college - a boarding school, if you will - I kept thinking that Inverness was NOT Hogwarts... Nat is a young man who wins a scholarship that takes him from his working-class town to Inverness College. Freedy is a young bodybuilder thug. Their paths parallel but never quite meet until... Nat happens upon Grace and Izzie, very rich twin sisters who attend Inverness (and very different from Patti, his hometown sweetheart). The three students hatch a kidnapping scheme to try to obtain some much-needed money from the girls' father. However, as we learned as children, if you Cry Wolf often enough, when a crisis emerges no one will believe you. While seldom actually "suspenseful," "Crying Wolf" was nonetheless a good book and a good purchase. I do recommend it; and I will be looking for more books by Peter Abrahams
Rating: 
Summary: Crying Wolf is just a bad book.
Review: I'm not going to pretend to be an educated, experienced critic, but like 95% of you out there I enjoy a good book. Crying Wolf is not a good book. Abrahams stumbles through the story almost as though he has put the first draft out there! At times it is almost painful to battle through. He continues to ask me questions and then answers them for me in the next sentence or paragraph. Mr. Abrahams, please please, let me, the reader, ask my own questions! The characters, especially Freedy, are terribly inconsistent and poorly brought together. Like 95% of you out there I don't want to waste time and I'm sorry I did on this book. With hesitation and much less patience I will try some of Abrahams others, they can't be worse than Crying Wolf.
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Summary: CRYING WOLF Doesn't Deliver
Review: Okay, so I purchased CRYING WOLF because Stephen King declared that Peter Abrahams is his "favorite American suspense writer" on it's cover jacket. I mean, Stephen King can't be wrong, right?
In CRYING WOLF, we meet Nat (I just wanted to add an "e" every time I read his name), an unassuming and humble young man that leaves home for the first time to attend college. Nat then meets Izzie and Grace, spoiled rich twins with different enough personalities to be able to tell them apart (but there was also the different hair color to assist the reader too). All three meet Professor Uzig, long-time family friend of the twins and instructor of Nietzsche at Inverness College. And in between, drug-addicted Freedy quietly enters the scene by chance on escape from California where he did something that was less than appropriate while cleaning pools. Alright. So the character development ain't half bad so far and thus takes us through the first couple hundred plus pages before any real action happens. This is probably where the majority of thriller/suspense novel fans will lose patience and I nearly did, but there was just enough entertainment between all the characters to keep me going. I have to say though, Freedy's slowly deteriorating mental state did make for a very interesting bad guy and Grace's less-than-trustworthy behavior helped mix up the three students relationships to keep things fresh, even if a bit unoriginal.
Moving on to the main event itself (which, again, doesn't really pick up after about two hundred pages): the poorly planned "kidnapping" of one of the twins by Nat and the other twin, with a demand of one million dollars in order to help keep Nat at Inverness after learning that his mother can't afford to keep him there anymore. The plan fails miserably, but not before Freedy secretly jumps in after learning about the plot and decides that the one "milion" dollars will be enough for him to start over down south in Florida. So, as Nat and a twin are being scolded by the twin's wealthy father for pulling such a prank, Freedy officially kidnaps and makes off with the twin in hiding. When Nat and the remaining twin discover this twist, it's a bit too late as no one now believes them anymore. Nat and twin take the law into their own hands and begin an investigation of their own and, incredibly, figure it all out within only a few short hours.
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT: So here's where things went wrong for me. First, what's up with the two early turn of the century rooms completely preserved underneath the tunnels of the college, complete with fully-stocked liquor cabinet and canopy bed? Second, how believable is it that Nat would actually go along with such a stunt as faking a kidnapping (and, ultimately, end up in prison for it)? Third, couldn't the twins just have asked for the money to help Nat out, considering how generous the family was early on in the novel? Also, why only hint at the father-son relationship between Freedy and Prof. Uzig in the last twenty pages? That in itself is worth exploring for another chapter. Finally, why end on such a depressing note? Did our hero really deserve it?
Overall, I enjoyed the slower pace as a direct result of better character development and the university backdrop in winter, but was left with the feeling that the plot was a bit rushed, if not forced, towards the end. Not something I would recommend for a quick vacation read and would expect to eventually see as a WB TV show. Obviously, Mr. King was referring to Mr. Abrahams other novels because this one just isn't worthy of his praise.
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