The Ladies of the Lake : NOVEL : HOTEL PARADISE,<i> By Martha Grimes (Alfred A. Knopf: $24; 368 pp.</i>

Hotel Paradise, a frayed-at-the-edges resort hotel, is located on 10 acres of woods near Spirit Lake, about two miles from the larger town of La Porte in Martha Grimes’ fictional small-town America. The 98-room family-owned inn is home to 12-year-old Emma Graham (whose name we don’t learn until almost the last chapter), her older brother Will and their mother, the hotel’s chef.

Responsible for table-waiting duties that include serving the guests three meals a day, Emma spends her free time daydreaming about her mother’s cooking, which she deems the best in the world, and exploring the lakefront and its surrounding woods.

“My mother’s buckwheat cakes are beyond my power to describe,” Emma says. “But I can see them in my mind’s eye--brown-veined, crispy-edged and just the right degree of sour.”

With a penchant for rib-sticking foods, Emma is never far from her next meal, whether it is ham roll slathered in cheese sauce or apple-onion laced pork chops and mashed potatoes, eating becomes a comfort and substitute for the lack of affection.

The story is narrated by Emma, a spunky, inquisitive but lonely girl whose world consists mainly of adults whom she cleverly manipulates into offering her marshmallow-topped cocoa, sticky buns and tidbits of information about the mystery that floats over Spirit Lake like a ghost.

More than 40 years ago, another 12-year-old girl, wearing a party dress, apparently fell from a rowboat late at night and drowned in the middle of the lake. Obsessed with the death of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Emma has researched the boating accident and the peculiar Devereau family with the zeal of Nancy Drew.

One morning, Emma hops a train for a 15-minute ride to Cold Flat Junction. Coming out of the railway station depot, she spots a strange girl who resembles Mary-Evelyn’s dead aunt Rose Devereau.

“Her look slid right off me as if we met like silk and satin and was perfectly indifferent in a place where there’s probably so little going on you’d think a stranger might cause a look to snag, at least. It either goes to show how uninteresting my presence is or that she was mightily preoccupied with her own mission.” The girl is beautiful, “with hair so fine and pale blond it looked like milkweed in the sun and her eyes the color of Spirit Lake itself, dark gray.”

When an unidentified young woman is shot and killed near the lake, Emma worries it is the beautiful stranger. This spectral presence of the girl appears three or four times in the book and is seen only by Emma.

The doomed Devereau clan, which consisted of three aunts, lived in the only house near the lake’s edge. Just prior to Mary-Evelyn’s death, her aunt Rose ran off and married Ben Queen, the best-looking man around these parts. After the accident, the remaining sisters abruptly left the house, never to return.

As the story unfolds, Emma discovers that Rose and Ben had a daughter, Fern, a promiscuous girl with mental problems who needed to be institutionalized. Fifteen years ago, Rose was murdered and Ben was convicted of the crime. Then, one night when Emma goes sleuthing at the Devereau house, Ben Queen, just out of prison, shows up. What she discovers from him helps solve the mystery of what happened to Mary-Evelyn.

Emma pries bits of gossip about the Devereau family from her eccentric great-aunt Aurora Paradise, who occupies the hotel’s fourth floor, where she lives on gin and fried chicken delivered by the hotel’s dumbwaiter. She queries the genteel maiden ladies Miss Flagler and Miss Flyte, who have gift shops in town. She quizzes her friend the sheriff at every possibility and she engages the retarded Wood brothers and their friend Mr. Root to help her trek through woods to snoop through the long-deserted Devereau house, which remains unlocked and fully furnished. Once there, one of the Wood brothers reenacts what he observed in the house the night Mary-Evelyn drowned.

“Hotel Paradise” follows Grimes’ 1992 novel “The End of the Pier.” Both books are set in the same locale and contain many of the same characters, including the sheriff and Maud Chadwick, the waitress at the Rainbow Cafe, and the Wood brothers. These novels bear a strong departure in style and content from her dozen or so British pub mysteries that feature Scotland Yard’s Richard Jury.

Unlike the page-turning mysteries that are plot-driven, this book pulls you along slowly. It is rich with metaphor and imaginative characters. Consider the opening paragraph: “It’s a blowing day. The wind feels weighted and the air like iron. As I walked the half-mile to the lake this evening, I could hardly push against this heaviness that settled on me like a coat of snow.”

I found myself skipping back and forth as I read it, languishing in the descriptive language and trying to figure out apparent inconsistencies, some of which were never resolved.

For instance, in one part of the book, there are four Devereau sisters, not three. “ ‘They were all touched,’ ” great aunt Aurora tells Emma. “ ‘Especially Isabel Devereau. Though maybe that made her less cold-hearted than Louise . . . (Rose) played the piano. She played and that crazy Lillian or Isabel sang,’ ” Aurora said.

Why Emma’s name is not revealed until the end of the book mystified and bothered me. When Ben Queen asks Emma her name on Page 334, she says: “It felt strange, my own name in my mouth, as if something about me had just come into being.”

The initials of Mary-Evelyn spell “me,” and when you say them, it sounds like Emmie. Was it the author’s intention to link forgotten children together through this device? The story is indeed a provocative study of lonely people.

“Hotel Paradise” takes on the mood of a lazy Sunday afternoon with its slow unveiling of events. Meandering and atmospheric, the novel reads with the ease of a daydream. Although it is overwritten and repetitive in parts, the author proves herself a writer of delicate sensibility whose work is notable for its delightfully quirky details, insightful perceptions into human relationships and graceful prose.