BOOK REVIEW : California Cool in a Cold-Blooded Book : SUN DIAL STREET <i> by Marti Leimbach</i> ; Doubleday; $20; 278 pages

Here’s one novel that Patti Davis--and anyone else with a bad attitude and a dysfunctional family--really ought to read. After “Sun Dial Street,” her own relations won’t seem quite so bad.

“Your family is etched onto you like a tattoo, something that can make you ashamed or proud,” announces Sam Haskell, a band manager from Boston, as he descends into Los Angeles and a particularly squalid vision of hell in Marti Leimbach’s novel.

Leimbach, still in her 20s, is a product of Harvard and the Writers Program at UC Irvine. Her first book, “Dying Young,” was promptly made into a movie--a particularly treacherous bit of good fortune for a young writer--and now she’s delivered the all-important second novel. What she demonstrates in “Sun Dial Street” is a mastery of California Dysfunctional.

Sam Haskell heads to Southern California to shop some demo tapes of the musicians he manages, but the real business at hand turns out to be his troubled reunion with his whacked-out mother and his sister, a borderline anorexic who survives on cigarettes, diet sodas and fish-burgers.

“I’m glad we’re back to hating each other,” sister Ginny snaps. “It was beginning to be an effort.”

The Haskell family, as Sam soon discovers, is a rat’s nest of dirty little secrets--sexual, psychiatric, criminal, among others. Why did his mother change her name to Jewel? Why does Ginny have a closetful of sexy lingerie--and exactly what is her relationship with Eli, the owner of the club where she works? As if his own family isn’t trouble enough, Sam befriends a charming old lady named Celia, who draws him into yet another family crowded with co-dependents. And, as things turn out in novels like this one, the two family circles intersect in strange and scary ways. Thus, for example, when Sam tails his sister in an effort to penetrate her secret life, he ends up being tailed by Celia’s jealous son-in-law, a murderous lout named Mikey who manufactures “dirty candy” in the shape of sexual organs.

The author works hard--perhaps a bit too hard--at evoking a sense of place along with a sense of peril. There’s an abundance of observed detail that D.C.-born Leimbach probably picked up during her Irvine days, but sometimes it creeps into dialogue, where it begins to sound more like voice-over than conversation.

“Welcome to the West Coast,” Ginny says. “A place bursting with young women in bikinis driving Jeeps, where manicurists stay open all night and houses smell of sea air and clay.”

The story is not all squalor and pain and denial. Ginny manages to work up a kind of cracked intimacy and gallows humor in the little house that she dubs “the horror on Sun Dial Street.”

“Is this a fuse situation,” asks Ginny when she discovers that the light switches don’t work, “or did you yank the bulbs?”

And Ginny’s mother gives as good as she gets. “She hasn’t any breasts,” Mom observes with acid innocence. “Isn’t that remarkable? I could have sworn a few years ago she had breasts.”

The pacing of Leimbach’s story is brisk and breezy, with short scenes packed into short chapters--she plots her course through the emotional shoals of family life by the shortest possible route. Still, even though “Sun Dial Street” starts out as a novel of manners, the story turns rather abruptly into a murder mystery--and Leimbach is perfectly willing to invoke some of the conventions of the hard-boiled detective fiction to draw and hold our attention.

According to a literary agent of my acquaintance, what the editors in New York are looking for nowadays is “smart” writing, and I suppose that “Sun Dial Street” is what they mean. This is a cool, witty and knowing take on the many varieties of misery in contemporary California--so cool, in fact, that it sometimes seems slightly cold-blooded.