BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Gripping Thriller Full of Passion, Crime and Violence : EYES OF A CHILD <i> by Richard North Patterson</i> , Knopf, $24, 594 pages

If the hallmark of a superior thriller is an opening passage that catches and holds the reader’s attention, then Richard North Patterson’s “Eyes of a Child” is among the very best of its genre.

“If you’re going to kill yourself,” says an intruder to the detestable Ricardo (Richie) Arias, “then you must leave a note.”

A suicide? A murder made to look like a suicide? Or merely the dream of a tortured child whose parents are locked in one of those messy divorces?

Before we learn the ugly truth, Patterson leads us through a labyrinth of passion and violence that starts out in the family courts and ends up in the criminal courts. Nearly 600 pages later, we are still in the grip of Patterson’s thoroughly contemporary fairy tale, and we must know how it all turns out.

Now the casual reader ought to be forewarned: “Eyes of a Child” is a tale of physical and sexual abuse toward women and children, a subject that’s so horrific that it sometimes tends to overwhelm the sheer entertainment value of the book.

The author handles it all with restraint. Still, since a thriller, no matter how dressed up in gore and guts, is supposed to be light reading, Patterson’s latest bestseller ought to come with a warning label: “This book may be harmful to your sense of well-being.”

Some of the horror, by the way, is focused on lawyers and judges, who generally come off as callous, petty and befogged. As the real threat begins to show itself, the legal system is depicted by Patterson--a former trial lawyer himself--as a Dickensian machine of enormous complexity that simply does not work.

The players in Patterson’s drama include Teresa Peralta, an upwardly mobile San Francisco attorney, and her erstwhile husband, the puppyish but also dangerous Richie Arias. The young couple have fallen out of love; Terri is making a run for the wall, and Richie is trying to stop her.

Caught in the middle is their daughter, a little girl who seems to side with her father, who’s always around because he is chronically underemployed, rather than her mother, who is busy chasing those billable hours.

“You don’t want to take care of him anymore,” Elena announces. “So I’m going to.”

And then there’s Christopher Paget, a patrician attorney from Pacific Heights who starts out as Terri’s boss, then turns into her mentor and, finally, her lover. Right away, we recognize that Paget is caring and decent, strong but not patronizing, a high achiever who is also in touch with his feelings. And he’s rich. So he is the ‘90s version of Prince Charming, and Terri--a hell of a trial lawyer in her own right--is an updated version of the damsel in distress.

Soon enough, though, we are shown that it is young Elena who is truly at risk, and the ordinary skirmishing of a messy divorce turns even uglier. Each parent makes accusations of “bad touching”--but it’s not entirely clear whether the child molester is Richie, or Chris Paget’s otherwise charming teen-age son, or some other malefactor.

A certain rough justice descends upon Richie Arias, and “Eyes of a Child” abruptly turns into an elaborate criminal and psychological detective story that flashes back and forth through the lives and memories of everyone in Terri’s benighted family. And we come to see child and spousal abuse--which is the real theme of “Eyes of a Child”--as a plague that leaves no family untouched.

When he finally sorts out the dark secrets, Patterson reveals many more victims than we first suspect. To his credit, he manages to achieve a real moment of surprise when we ultimately discover Richie’s fate--and, above all, when we learn the identity of the person who was the instrument of that fate.

“Eyes of a Child” is a hard-boiled thriller with a soft center. At the heart of the story is a profoundly sentimental notion of happy childhoods and how they are corrupted by the worst impulses of grown-ups who are expected to act as guardians and not exploiters of children.

“Whoever first conceived of a broken heart,” muses Terri as she surveys not a few ruined childhoods, “must have loved a child.”