Hazing used to be a dirty little secret, but it’s been in headlines often enough in the past few years that you’d have expected it to have been the subject of endless movies, television shows, and novels over the years.

At first glance, the practice sounds harmless enough – quaint, even, a throwback to the good old days before city, state, and federal governments tried to legislate every last bit of behavior. Remember when one student could yell at another to shut up, that he was trying to study, without being expelled for calling his classmate a jerk? Remember when a teacher could rap your knuckles without being arrested for engaging in corporal punishment? Remember when a coach could put his arm around a young player’s shoulder while talking to him without being accused of perversion?

Hazing sounds a little like that. Senior kids giving freshman and sophomores a hard time. Blindfolding them and putting their hands in a bowl of spaghetti, telling them it’s worms. Making them stand on a bench in the locker room and sing the school song. Recruiting the newest team members to carry the bags of the upperclassmen. What could the problem be?

Well, if you’ve followed the headlines, you know it’s gone too far. A fraternity at North Carolina State University lost accreditation for forcing boys to run naked through other fraternities and sororities. Three students at St. John’s University stood trial for paddling a classmate so badly he was hospitalized for two weeks with kidney damage. Even in high schools, there have been charges of forced sodomy and beatings sure to take the fun out of being on any team.

Strangely, this area has been largely unexplored by fiction writers and movie producers, until now. Mike Lupica, one of the best sportswriters in the country, has written a crime novel that will curl your hair. If you’re Howard Stern, forget I said that.

“Too Far” (Putnam, 290 pages, $24.95) is the story of a reporter, Ben Mitchell, who quit at the age of 40 because a story he wrote killed a man, a hardworking baseball coach and manager who used to tell war stories from his time in the Marines in Vietnam to motivate his players. When Mitchell learned they were all lies, the manager begged him not to write the story, that it would ruin him. Mitchell ran the story anyway, and the next day the former Marine shot himself in the head.

Sitting in a coffee shop six months later, he’s approached by a high school senior, Sam Perry, who wants to be the same kind of reporter Mitchell was when he “retired.” He tells him of the unexplained death of the manager of a basketball team and hinted at the probability of hazing at the team’s camp that got out of hand. When the tires of the boy’s car are slashed, and the window of his mother’s store is smashed with a brick, the reporter figures he’s onto something. He begins to investigate and finds a terrible wall of silence and, ultimately, murder.

Mr. Lupica offers a scathing examination of hazing, an activity that too often reaches criminal proportions. His book should be read by every fraternity member, college or high school team member, coach and parent.

It’s not as if Mr. Lupica is some crazed, law-and-order police-state advocate. He attacks conservative talk radio generically, and Rush Limbaugh specifically, for dumbing down the news – as if he never heard of Michael Moore or read the predictable, cliched, one-note columns of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in the New York Times. But he recognizes hazing as a terrible affront to human dignity, as well as a potential ruination of a young person’s physical well-being, and opposition to it straddles all political philosophy.

Although most famous as a sportswriter, Mr. Lupica’s young adult novel, “Travel Team,” remained on the New York Times best-seller list for three months, and he has written several mystery novels before “Too Far.” His first, “Dead Air,” was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1986, then filmed for CBS as “Money, Power and Murder.”

The subject of “Too Far” is so important to Mr. Lupica that he wanted to get as much exposure for it as possible. As is common in the publishing community, this can often be aided by getting quotes from other successful writers to print on the dust jacket. Thus, if you are a fan of Harlan Coben, Robert B. Parker, or Pete Hamill – all of whom have provided laudatory comments for this novel – the hope and expectation is that you will also enjoy this book.

There is also a quote from Patricia Cornwell, who gives quotes as often as boxers blame God for a loss. But it turns out that she didn’t merely have nice things to say. After reading the manuscript, she turned into an editor, telling Mr. Lupica that the novel started too slowly, that it didn’t really begin until readers met the hero, Ben Mitchell. He thought about it, decided that one of the world’s best-selling authors knew what she was talking about, and excised the first 40 pages of the book.

I don’t know what was in those first pages, but I suspect Ms. Cornwell was right. Although “Too Far” is a terrific tale of suspense, impeccably paced and told with heart, maybe additional pages would have taken away, rather than added, to the experience. Like having a bowl of Rice Krispies between courses at Le Cirque.