`Turtle Moon' Characters Compelling

In Verity, Fla., where "the sky is filled with heat waves and parakeets," it reaches 99 in the shade - if you can find shade.

In Verity, it's usually so quiet "you can hear the strangler figs dropping their fruit on the hoods of parked cars," and in spring the roads are covered with the smashed shells of turtles - "hard green globes the size of Scooter Pies" - which have mistaken the town lights for moonlight.

The town's cheap rents and wild hibiscus have drawn a population of divorced women from New York, women with hair turned green from chlorine, who drink diet sodas and talk about their troubled children. And in Verity, notwithstanding its name, there is a lot of lying going on.

Keith Rosen, "the meanest boy in Verity," is telling many of the lies. At 12, he steals "lunch money, teachers' wallets, birthstone rings right off his classmates' fingers." He cuts school to hang out at Burger King, and when on a dare he pierces his own ear with an embroidery needle, he doesn't even bleed - that's how mean he is.

Keith is getting addicted to trouble as much as his mother, Lucy, and the other divorced women in town are addicted to Dr Pepper.

As in her last novel, "Seventh Heaven," Alice Hoffman creates in her new one the smell, feel and taste of a small town, a delightfully palpable geography. Like other Hoffman novels, "Turtle Moon" (Putnam, $21.95) features an angry adolescent, a divorced mother, a haunted survivor, and a ghost - a real one - among an array of characters whose lives are marked by disappointment.

Unlike the earlier novels, "Turtle Moon" also features a corpse. In a town where the last major crime was in 1958 - "when one of the Platts shot his brother in an argument over a Chevy Nomad they had bought together on time" - there has been, astonishingly, a murder. One of the divorced women in Keith and Lucy's pink stucco condo is found dead on her kitchen floor, still clutching four quarters for the basement dryer. The woman's infant daughter is missing - and so is Keith.

Enter Julian Cash, a man who grew up in Verity, at least until he was sent off to reform school, and whose own mother "fainted the first time she saw (him) and she gave him away that very night. As a little boy he was so ugly that tree frogs would go limp with fear in the palm of his hand."

Julian is a suspicious man with little to say and little use for other people; dogs, though, are a different matter. As the member of Verity's police force who handles the dogs used to track narcotics and missing persons, Julian sets out to find Keith and the murdered woman's baby.

This is when Lucy Rosen begins to lie in earnest. She has to - circumstantially, it looks bad for young Keith. So she sets out to provide the police with the identity of the murdered woman, who was using an alias, and all she has to go on is that they both used to go to the same hairdresser in New York.

Julian is a master interpreter of people's lies, and he can read Lucy the way tracking dogs "can gauge the extra molecules in the air" near their quarry. He accedes to her break-all-the-rules scheme, and to buy time, he lies to his chief of police - although the chief knows he's lying, as Julian intends him to.

What Julian and Lucy don't expect is that they will be drawn to each other with a desire fiercer and more inescapable than the noonday heat. The other thing Julian and Lucy don't expect is that the murderer also will be looking for the two missing children.

Hoffman's novels get better and better. "Turtle Moon" is replete with sensuous, lyrical description and powerfully compelling characters. Written with wit and insight and compassion, the story is memorably suspenseful, memorably erotic.

In Verity, there are mangrove and sea grape, mosquitoes as big as bumblebees, and merlins that nest in bald cypress. In Verity, there are people whose hearts insist on trying one more time. In Verity, Alice Hoffman has given us another vivid landscape in which to explore love and loss.

Seattle writer Lauren Glen Dunlap is collaborating with painter Kathleen Fruge-Brown on an artist's book structured around the life of St. Francis.