The gruesome scene that Sheriff Hugh DeWitt encounters fewer than 50 pages into Judith Guest's newest novel, The Tarnished Eye, sets the stage for a tale that is darkly disturbing but nearly impossible to set aside.

As Hugh and his deputy Ian investigate a handyman's report of murder in a wealthy summer cottage in the tiny northern Michigan town of Blessed, they must fight first the overwhelming, sickly odor of death too-long-ignored, then force themselves to move from room to room as they discover body after body, each bloated and rotting beyond recognition.

With details that rise frighteningly off the page, we find ourselves stepping in tandem with Hugh, terrified at what might come next but bound by duty to uncover every last drop of blood:

"(Hugh) makes his way across the room to the body in front of the door. It's a woman lying face down in a pool of black blood. . . . The swollen flesh of her body has split in a hundred places; a viscous liquid seeping through the cracks. A parade of maggots moves busily over the surfaces."

Someone has murdered the Norbois family - Edward, the somewhat cold and task-driven father; Paige, the mother who has just parted ways with her lover of several years; and their four children, Derek, 19; Stephen, 17; David, 13; and Nicole, 10. The Tarnished Eye is Hugh's quest to discover the killer's identity.

Guest, whose best- selling novel Ordinary People inspired the 1980 Academy Award-winning film, delivers a new story that is at once murder mystery and an exploration of family. And while the violent details are at times difficult to stomach, the story itself is compelling and gripping.

The Norbois family is somewhat reclusive, which raises suspicions in itself, but add to the mix Edward's disgruntled business partner, who has been forging checks and embezzling from the family fortune, and Paige's lover, who is waiting confidently for the reconciliation he knows Paige will soon want, and the mystery becomes increasingly more complicated.

But Guest doesn't stop there. The auxiliary characters are numerous and equally intriguing - from Maura, Derek's former landlady and lover who manages an apartment building across the street from the home of a recently murdered young college woman, to Coby, the caretaker who first discovered the bodies and who pockets a shotgun shell in a moment of fear that his brother might be implicated.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is the development of Hugh's character. A small-town cop for whom the murders raise multiple issues of family and loyalty, Hugh grapples throughout the novel with problems of marriage, parenting a preteen girl, grieving the loss of his infant son, and impotency. Although Hugh is a decidedly engaging character who adds to the novel's sense of depth and narrative flow, the one place where Guest falters is in failing to allow Hugh's personal issues to carry the depth they seem to demand.

The SIDS death of Hugh's 11-month-old son Petey, for example, opens the novel with promises of emotional complexity as Hugh barbecues dinner for his family and fights back painful memories on the three-year anniversary of Petey's death. But after suggesting the overwhelming nature of Hugh's grief, we hear little mention of it again until Hugh suddenly and rather oddly confesses his emotions to the wife of a former murder suspect in the novel's closing pages.

Based loosely on both a mass murder that occurred in northern Michigan and the 1960s serial killings at the University of Michigan, The Tarnished Eye reads with the page-turning speed of a suspenseful summer mystery. And while the novel's key characters long for the human depth that could carry this book beyond the fictional confines of a mere genre mystery, Guest succeeds in writing a story that reminds us that life can be fleeting and the relationships we form can be the most important part of who we are.

Jennie A. Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in "Prairie Schooner," "Colorado Review," and other publications. She lives in Platteville.