BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Revealing One Family’s Dark Secrets and a Killer or Two : DEAD MAN’S DANCE <i> by Robert Ferrigno</i> ; Putnam $23.95, 400 pages

“He wasn’t a dancer,” writes Robert Ferrigno about a man named Quinn, the troubled hero of “Dead Man’s Dance,” “but he had some moves.”

Quinn is an investigative reporter with an unbelievably cushy job at an upscale magazine, but when we meet him, he’s a ticking time bomb of dysfunction, “hot tempered, raw as a blister, more comfortable in the company of criminals than cognoscenti,” all of which means that Quinn and his moves fit comfortably into the conventions of the postmodern hard-boiled mystery.

For example, Quinn is utterly unsentimental and even unscrupulous when it comes to chasing down a hot story, but he comes across as distinctly sappy when he dotes on his young daughter and moons after his ex-wife. And he is still working out a lot of unfinished business about the mother who abandoned him in childhood, and the stepfather, a prominent Orange County judge, who keeps him at a safe distance.

Then, too, he can’t quite seem to work out his problems with Jen, the aloof young woman who shares his bed, a photojournalist with a hot body but a hard heart. He’s pushing 40, she’s strictly Generation X, and the relationship is rendered even more volatile when she draws the not-so-kindly attention of a wealthy benefactor named Ellis Fontayne. Quinn implores her to marry him, but he’s hard-pressed to compete with a rich and influential attorney who offers himself as her patron.

All of these flash points go blooey at the same time when a figure from Quinn’s distant past shows up--a former dancer named Joe Steps, newly released from prison and using a wheelchair--and, not quite coincidentally, Quinn’s stepfather ends up dead.

The tormented Quinn sets himself the task of searching out the murderer of his stepfather, but he soon finds himself drawn into a much deeper and darker mystery that harks all the way back to his dimly remembered childhood. Exactly who is Joe Steps after all--Quinn’s long-lost father? The murderer of Quinn’s stepfather? Or is Joe himself a victim?

As it turns out, “Dead Man’s Dance” is driven less by Quinn and his quest to unravel his dark family secrets than by a couple of weirdly engaging young killers, Rick and Hugo, who embody a certain stylish malevolence that sets them apart from the usual gang of suspects in murder mysteries.

Rick is a cheerful psychopathic killer who really wants to be a hairdresser: “I pity your pH balance,” he tells one victim. And Hugo is an ascetic and a philosopher, “a walking shadow, marooned between life and death.” Together, they’ve embarked on a mission of murder that draws them ever closer to Quinn and his various significant others.

Ferrigno sets his story in Orange County, but it’s a treacherous version of otherwise familiar terrain, ranging from the gate-guarded sanctuaries of the privileged and powerful to the “surf-trash” bars where young skinheads stoke themselves up before embarking on gay-bashing expeditions in Laguna Beach.

“Beneath its crust of glamour and wealth, Orange County bubbled with resentment,” writes Ferrigno, “a poisonous stew of rich against poor, color against color, and everyone against the new immigrants on the block.”

He renders the otherwise familiar Chandler-esque figures of “Dead Man’s Dance” in the garb, the argot and the emotional baggage of the ‘90s--everyone in the book seems edgy, wired, afflicted by hungers that cannot be sated.

“What’s wrong?” asks Jen after a lovemaking session in the bathtub with Quinn. “I always feel this . . . undercurrent of frustration inside you.”

“Too much talk radio,” he quips. “I’ll cut back. Promise.”

“Dead Man’s Dance” remains distinctly noir as we follow Quinn across a deceptively sunny landscape, as if the sun that burns so brightly in the sky over Orange County is bringing just about everyone to a fast boil of ambition and betrayal.

“I think I radiate . . . a dangerous, very bankable intensity, like Andre Agassi or Eddie Vedder,” says Rick, the preening killer. “Once I get my own salon, I bet I get some serious hair care and makeup endorsements.”

Even at the obligatory moment of revelation, when Ferrigno puts the key players on a boat at sea and allows them to explain all the mysteries to each other, “Dead Man’s Dance” is still humming with a certain unresolved tension that is somehow more intriguing than the neat solutions that the author feels compelled to offer up.