This novel tracks the racial turmoil that erupts after a white woman turns up in a New Jersey city and claims her 4-year-old son was abducted by a black carjacker.

Mrs. Smith let her car roll down a boat ramp with the boys inside, then lied for nine days that they had been abducted by a black carjacker.

Although Mrs. Smith had lied for nine days with tales of a black carjacker who had taken her children, the town's black ministers prayed for her and pleaded with prosecutors for her life.

"I told her I would release it to the media" because her lie about a black carjacker was causing deep pain among blacks, and he said he owed to the town to end the racial divisiveness it had caused.

In Boston, the South Carolina case has brought back ugly memories of another murder which was initially pinned on a fictitious black carjacker: the 1989 case of Charles and Carol Stuart.

Mrs. Smith drowned her children last October, later telling her town and the rest of the country that a black carjacker took them.

Despite their differences, the men and women almost all connect (or try to), and all turn out to be fundamentally good (if foolish), including the young black carjacker who justifies his black-on-white crimes by invoking 1960's radicals like Bobby Seale.

The book is reminiscent of the much publicized 1994 news story about Susan V. Smith, who made the phony assertion that her two sons, whom she murdered, had been abducted by a black carjacker.

In a novel that echoes the Susan Smith case, racial tensions erupt in a New Jersey city after a dazed and bleeding white woman claims her 4-year-old son was abducted by a black carjacker.

Mr. Stuart had said a black carjacker killed his pregnant wife, Carol, in 1989.