THE VIGIL : by Clay Reynolds (St. Martin’s/Marek: $13.95).

A middle-age woman and her pretty but trashy teen-age daughter stop in a small Texas town. The chief feature of this town is a central park in which the woman spends most of the next 30 years. She is a runaway wife, leaving her rich but philandering husband back in Georgia, a flight that her daughter is not especially eager to share. While the pair’s Hudson is being repaired at an auto shop, the daughter disappears.

Instead of the usual days or weeks of anguish over a missing person, followed by a reluctant resumption of the reins of daily life, Clay Reynolds plunks his mother-of-missing-child down in alien territory, and that’s where she stays--forever.

An interesting premise, but one that’s difficult to sustain for an entire novel, and so the author turns his attentions to the sheriff whose duty it is to track down the girl, keep peace in the town, tend to his own personal memories and miseries, and, in the process, become somewhat obsessed with the strange woman who haunts the park bench. Alas, Reynolds finds his male character more interesting than the wretched woman, and it is the sheriff’s story that develops more fully. An understandable sidetrack, however, given that her vigil occupies the woman’s every waking moment.

The rather shaky central theme is fleshed out with a healthy dose of suspense, poignancy and action.