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The subtitle of The Runner pretty much sums up David Samuels's entertaining tome: "A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue." In 1988, Hogue created the false identity of Alexi Santana, a home-schooled orphan and elite distance runner who herded sheep in Utah and applied to Princeton University. The duped admissions office thought they were accepting an eclectic, athletic 18-year-old, when in fact Hogue was 28 and had a history of arrests and run-ins with the law. Hogue had to defer admission to Princeton for one year because he was serving a year in jail in Utah State Prison for receiving stolen bike parts. But "Alexi" finally arrived at Princeton, made the track team, earned nearly all As and became a member of Ivy, one of Princeton's most exclusive eating clubs. His real identity was exposed after two years, when a Yale student who knew Hogue from California spotted the imposter at a track meet and alerted authorities.

After drifting for a while, Hogue landed in Telluride, Colorado -- it's here Samuels begins his book -- where he worked as a handyman for super-rich landowners. In early 2006, as police closed in, Hogue fled, leaving behind more than 7,000 stolen items in his house and storage locker worth more than $100,000. He was apprehended in a Barnes & Noble in Arizona, pled guilty to theft and received a sentence of no more than 10 years.

Himself a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, Samuels has spent more than a decade researching Hogue's life. The tale of Hogue's time in Telluride and his Princeton years is particularly engaging and detailed. It's hard not to laugh at the university administrators who actually believed Alexi Santana's application. He claimed he lived by himself in the Mohave Desert on the "state line" between Utah and Arizona (his fake father was dead and his fake mother lived in Switzerland and suffered from an ultimately -- and conveniently -- fatal blood disease); he said he worked as a mosaic tile maker, a cattle herder and a race-horse exerciser; he had no transcripts and his only "letter of recommendation" came from the proprietor of the Lazy T Ranch in Park City, Utah. Alexi did have press clippings showing he had won races with impressive times -- of course, he was 10 years older than the high school kids he dusted.

The Runner evolved out of articles that appeared in The New Yorker, and it's obvious at times that Samuels had to stretch his material to reach book length (and even then, it's only 176 pages). He mentions 13 hours of tape recorded interviews with Hogue, and talks about spending several days with him in Princeton. It's apparent Hogue has been reticent about large parts of his life. That's a shame, because it forces Samuels to rely on Hogue's paper trail (application essays, police station transcripts) and on the speculation of those who thought they knew Hogue. Considering the man's many cons and his constant lies about his past, can his friends and acquaintances really claim to have much insight into the guy? It's not Samuels's fault, of course, that Hogue doesn't open up, but it leaves significant holes in the narrative. Still, even the incomplete portrait of Hogue reveals a truly complex figure who is driven, intelligent, incredibly well-read, deceitful, arrogant, scrappy, athletic, curious and, in a way, pathetic in his need to pretend to be someone else. Give him credit for tricking so many people for so long but, in the end, Hogue couldn't outrun himself.