BOOK REVIEW : Miami Vice Meets Biological Warfare : BONES OF CORAL <i> by James W. Hall</i> , Alfred A. Knopf, $20, 315 pages

“Bones of Coral,” James W. Hall’s new thriller, is set mainly in Key West, where rot and corruption in a tropical outpost are buried beneath the veneer of tourism.

Hall makes Key West a place you can see--plantation architecture with island accents, rotting mansions, fisherman’s cottages with flaking paint and luridly beautiful sunsets--an island of genteel charm and disintegrating ideals.

It’s the perfect place for starting over, a spot to return to when things go wrong, as they do for both Shaw Chandler and Trula Montoya. To them, Key West is home: It’s the place where they went to high school and briefly dated each other, the island they left behind, and where they each return, late in their 30s, drawn back by separate, disturbing circumstances.

Trula Montoya, a soap-opera star living in New York City, comes back to Key West to live with her father, the aging Dr. Montoya, after learning she has multiple sclerosis, a disease that may not kill her soon, but has certainly wrecked her life and threatens to make her an invalid.

Shaw Chandler returns to the island in an effort to track down his father’s murderer.

Chandler is working as a paramedic in Miami when he is called one night to treat a gunshot victim, only to discover the dead man is his father, Hanson, whom he hasn’t seen for 20 years. Hanson Chandler disappeared, walking out on his teen-age son and his wife, after taking the blame for the murder of two men in Key West.

Chandler doesn’t know much about what happened to him in the intervening years, but he knows his old man isn’t a suicide. Almost without intending to, Chandler begins to uncover evidence linking his father’s death to a much larger scandal in Key West, one in which Dr. Montoya, Trula’s father, was also involved.

Lurking behind this scandal is an ex-Navy officer named Capt. Douglas Barnes, who operates Mount Trashmore, a high-tech garbage disposal facility in Key West, and his psychotic son, Dougie, a character so stupid and sinister he gives you the shivers.

“Is he one of those multiple personalities?” someone asks after meeting Dougie. No, his girlfriend replies, he has only two personalities, “dumb and dumber.” She might have said, lethal and more lethal: Dougie is an unfeeling killing machine.

Chandler not only has to reconcile his lingering anguish over his father’s abandonment and the shock of finding him dead, but he must also deal with his mother, who has been bilked out of her fishing-tackle business by a young huckster and is indulging a serious alcoholic binge when he returns to Key West. The only bright spot in the picture is Trula, with whom he reconnects and begins a tender affair.

The closer Chandler comes to discovering the truth about his father’s death, the more bodies begin turning up. There is an unexpected connection between his father’s murder, Mount Trashmore and Trula’s disease; the explanation involves biological warfare experiments.

Secret government-sponsored testing is certainly an interesting subject for a thriller to explore, and a timely one. It’s much scarier than hackneyed schemes involving municipal corruption or crime-for-profit plots.

If there’s a drawback to “Bones of Coral,” it’s this: So much nasty killing goes on, one has to steel oneself for it. Some readers may find the grisly violence excessive, and women in particular might be put off by locker-room raunchiness.

Shaw Chandler, however, is a winning character, and he and Trula carry the book. James W. Hall can scare one to death, but he’s always in control of his story, which is laid out in rather sharp, and often beautiful, prose.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens” by Claire Tomalin (Alfred A. Knopf).