REALITY CHECK

After his adored ex-girlfriend Clea disappears from her ritzy Vermont boarding school, Cody—a working-class boy who, after a devastating knee injury, went from high-school football star to high-school dropout—travels to Vermont to find her, and becomes embroiled in a dangerous mystery. Cody may be from the wrong side of the tracks and have limited scholastic ability, but he possesses love, loyalty and his own kind of dogged smarts. The setup feels unnecessarily protracted, but once Cody arrives in Vermont, the thriller/mystery angle kicks in and the material becomes much more absorbing. After a series of nicely plotted twists and subterfuges, Cody ends up working at the Dover Academy, where he meets Clea’s classmates, some of the school’s staff and various locals, who may or may not have had a role in her disappearance. The climax is unexpected and not enormously credible, but it doesn’t matter, because by that point readers will be frantically turning pages and fully invested in Abrahams’s message of true love conquering all obstacles. (Mystery. 12 & up)