Queen of Hearts by Susan Richards Shreve (Simon & Schuster: $17.95; 354 pp.)

“Queen of Hearts” is Susan Richards Shreve’s sixth and most ambitious novel. Set in a small coastal town in Massachusetts called Bethany, the novel may be thought of as a psychological group portrait of a community, though Shreve centers the story on one character, Francesca Woodbine, known to her friends as Cesca. She is an enigmatic figure who takes after her grandmother, Santa Francesca Allegra, an Italian immigrant who arrived in Bethany half a century before. “Her grandmother was a whore. Did you know that?,” whisper the townsfolk about the young Francesca, who is bathed in mystery from the novel’s outset. Having been born with a membrane over her face, Cesca is said to possess clairvoyant powers. It is she who asks the novel’s pivotal question in the opening chapter: “What is the difference between a fortune and a choice?” Her father’s confident answer is tested, again and again, as the plot unfolds: “Fortune is what happens to you,” he says, “and choice is what you do about it.”

A lot happens to the citizens of Bethany in the course of this capacious novel. The story opens with the rape of 14-year-old Cesca at the annual spring Festival of Fortunes in 1955. This rape is the heroine’s first great secret (one known by nearly everyone else in the town, since the rapist was put up to his deed by a group of local boys). Her second, and most horrific, secret is that she killed her husband-to-be, Colin Mallory, on the eve of their wedding, having discovered him with an almost-naked woman (she was wearing a hat). Shreve writes: “Colin Mallory died slowly. When Cesca shot him, he started after her before pitching forward. And then he pulled himself forward through his own blood to the front door, calling for help.” The town does not succeed in solving this amazing murder, and Cesca is forced to carry the dread secret with her.

As if refusing to let human beings contrive their own disasters, nature piles on something of her own in the form of Hurricane Elsie, which decimates Bethany. Among the results of the storm is the death of Billy Naylor, a much-despised local whom most of the town assumes to have been Colin Mallory’s killer. The town feels oddly cleansed by the hurricane, at least until another unsolved murder is discovered. The skeleton of Celia Hamilton, a young woman who worked at the local bookstore owned by Will Weaver, the doctor’s charming son, is found in a marsh near the Leonora River. But who killed Celia Hamilton? This question haunts the townsfolk, who can’t find it in themselves to suspect Will, a fellow who (as only the reader knows) once amused himself as a boy by strangling cats in his father’s barn.

And so the plot moves from primal scene to primal scene, the whirlpool channeling around Cesca Woodbine, who eventually goes off to Juilliard and becomes a famous folk singer. “Queen of Hearts” is, in a sense, a portrait of the artist as a young woman, for Cesca embodies all the mystery of creativity. Her songs are poems that encode the town’s past in symbols that they, for obvious reasons, prefer to ignore. The novel’s climax occurs at Cesca’s homecoming concert at Rooster’s Tavern, a landmark building where her grandmother once lived as the town’s fortune-teller and resident whore. The concert presents a unique opportunity for the town to experience self-knowledge through art’s mediating offices. The concert also precipitates the novel’s neatly plotted conclusion.

Shreve has written an eerily plausible parable of our times. The novel, overall, strains for a mythic quality that seems only partially achieved, as at the beginning, where the river’s symbolic aspect is overemphasized: “Passions frozen during the long bleak winter surged out of control like the Leonora River, which in late spring swung a full skirt surrounding the town.” One never for a moment forgets that Shreve is writing and that symbols abound. This is a problem. One prefers to realize such things gradually, in the course of having been swept along by a good story. Nonetheless, “Queen of Hearts” is an impressive book, the author’s best to date, and well worth reading.