BOOK REVIEW : Alice Hoffman Offers a Touch of ‘Verity’ : TURTLE MOON <i> by Alice Hoffman</i> ; Putnam; $21.95; 255 pages

Two sentences into “Turtle Moon,” you’ll wonder why anyone would choose to live in Verity, Fla., where the humidity is so high that people start their day with iced coffee before going out to scrape squashed strangler figs off the roofs of their cars. May is the worst month, when the natives go a bit mad and even the dead are restless. Then, “the air all around the town limits is so thick that sometimes a soul cannot rise and instead attaches itself to a stranger, landing right between the shoulder blades with a thud that carries no more weight than a hummingbird.”

Yet despite the climate and the stalled souls, Verity has become a small Mecca, not only attracting retirees fleeing snow and slush, but also appealing to a growing colony of new divorcees, drawn there by low rents and the delusion that beach towns offer cheap and wholesome recreation for the children.

Lucy Rosen is one such woman. Young and attractive, she’s the mother of 12-year-old Keith, who has become a precocious juvenile delinquent after only eight months in Verity.

Bethany Lee is another marital refugee. She wound up in Verity with her infant daughter after a harrowing car and bus flight from her estranged husband, who turned abruptly from a cheerful philanderer into a ferocious contender for custody of their daughter.

Bethany Lee is a name she chose en route, to foil Randy’s attempt to find her and take Rachel away forever. There’s a growing legion of such women, their hair faintly green from constant submersion in chlorinated pools, their standard of living radically reduced, “all addicted to Diet Dr. Pepper and . . . shocked to discover that in Verity, mosquitoes grew to the size of bumblebees and that sea grape, which grew wild along the beach, could pull their children right into the thicket if they didn’t keep to the wooden paths.”

Lucy and Bethany, however, are the only such colonists we’ll ever know well, and by the beginning of the second chapter, Bethany has been found murdered on her kitchen floor, four quarters for the condo laundry machines clutched in her fist.

That leaves Lucy Rosen, her recalcitrant son, Keith, and the town’s taciturn and reclusive police officer, Julian Cash, as the major characters in this mesmerizing story.

Actually, these three are virtually the entire active cast, except for Julian’s fierce tracking dog, Arrow, and the ghost of Julian’s dead cousin, Bobby, who was killed in a car driven by Julian about 20 years earlier. Bobby’s unquiet spirit has lingered in the fatal tree ever since, sidetracking the otherwise straightforward plot while he waits for Julian’s guilt to subside.

Although we meet Lucy’s colleagues at the local paper and the remarkable woman who was Julian’s foster mother, the novel really belongs to Lucy, Keith, Julian and Arrow, whose interconnection is heightened by the steamy, hermetic atmosphere of Verity itself.

Part ghost story, part murder mystery, “Turtle Moon” is a risky amalgam of suspense, mysticism, social commentary and romance; a volatile mixture kept in precarious control by author Alice Hoffman.

Although ghosts are notoriously hard to integrate into naturalistic narrative, the spirit of Bobby Cash generally avoids becoming maudlin and intrusive.

Set in a town where turtles still walk across the main street to nest and rattlesnakes can occupy a phone booth for an entire month, one restless but good-natured shade hardly overtaxes the reader’s credulity. If disembodied spirits could thrive anywhere, a gumbo-limbo tree in Verity would be the place.

Where the weather lends even the most mundane everyday events a hyper reality, disbelief can be suspended more easily. Clearly aware that ghosts can quickly grow tiresome, Hoffman keeps our natural skepticism at bay with frequent infusions of satiric wit and her uncanny insight into the symbiotic and complex relationships developing between unlikely pairs of characters.

By the end of the book, Keith, Lucy, Julian and Arrow have all been radically altered by the events set into motion by the tragedy of Bethany Lee’s murder. In between, flashbacks into the earlier lives of these people provide the grounding necessary to keep “Turtle Moon” balanced on the thin edge of plausibility. Although the resolution is almost conventionally happy, the means of arriving there have been refreshingly unorthodox.