Serial killer thriller, far-fetched but gripping

The prophets of this dual vision have mined the territory with gusto over the years, among them Elmore Leonard, crime-reporter-turned-novelist Edna Buchanan and the high priest of Sunshine State-based wackiness, Carl Hiaasen.

So kudos to Lisa Unger for venturing onto such well-trod ground with a novel that takes an especially dark look at the state's underbelly. While "Black Out," her third book, doesn't always work - it's prone, near the end, to some cartoonish resolutions - it still boasts a largely gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose.

"There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance," Annie Powers, the novel's heroine, observes early on. "Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life."

Annie is a woman with a murky past, the monstrous details of which emerge slowly, measured out like spent bullet casings periodically tossed along a dark road.

We know she has a different name now than in this past life. She has a sweet 4-year-old daughter named, oddly, Victory, and a supportive husband with a mysterious job in an undefined line of security work that requires him to disappear for long stretches of time.

Gradually, painfully, Annie fills in the blanks. She was somehow involved with a notorious serial killer whose death has been confirmed to her. Her father abandoned her. Her mother was a fragile madwoman.

Yet despite Herculean efforts to wall off those terrible chapters of her life, Annie's past returns to stalk her. Someone who knows her birth name, Ophelia, is sending mysterious messages. Someone knows something he shouldn't, that couldn't possibly be known in the world of the living.

Unger takes on the challenging task of telling Annie's story in what amounts to double-flashback style. In the present, Annie is aboard a cargo ship on the open ocean fleeing for her life. This is where the book starts with its alluring first line, "Today something interesting happened. I died."

In the first series of flashbacks, Annie is living her pampered, post-trauma life with her husband and daughter in a huge seaside house with all the amenities, including housekeeper. In the second series, she is growing up with her mother, who has dragged her to a Florida trailer park on what appears to be a lunatic's mission.

Unger skillfully weaves these three narratives back and forth to create the perfect razor's edge of tension.

The book falters when it's time for Unger to complete the multipart puzzle she's constructed. She doesn't cut corners so much as force together interlocking scenarios that are just a bit too far-fetched.

Sadly, these missteps threaten to overshadow the book's disturbing core, which is rewarding in a darkly voyeuristic way: the gruesomely realistic tale of a troubled teen's descent into a codependent hell on earth.