"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Title page verso.

"Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school. Robert Mallory, a new student, is bright, handsome, charismatic-- and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them-- Bret in particular-- with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends-- or his own mind-- to make sense of the danger they appear to be in?"-- From publisher.