Nothing Lost, a novel by John Gregory Dunne, sets the trial at the center of his story in a state he calls Midland. "Midland suggests the middle of the country," explains the narrator, "that part grandiosely identified as the Great Plains."

By setting his tale in the middle of the country, Dunne seems to be saying that this story is a metaphor for middle America. Ironically, his characters are far from middle-of-the- road. Dunne infuses a smattering of melodrama and heaps of the profane into each personality to tell a dark and cynical story. The America in Dunne's Midland is a corrupt land with few appealing characteristics.

The story's narrator, Max Cline, is a gay man whose career as a prosecuting attorney has been subjugated by the political ambitions of his boss, Attorney General Jerrold Wormwold. "The Worm," as he's called, is gearing up to run for governor. So when the gruesome torture and murder of a black man named Edgar Parlance turns into a high-profile trial, he takes Cline off the case and replaces him with deal-making playboy JJ McClure.

The Worm, it seems, doesn't want a gay lead prosecutor tainting his born-again conservative platform - especially not now that Congresswoman Sonora "Poppy" McClure, the most media-savvy politician in Midland and a conservative talk-show hit, has mentioned that she is considering entering the gubernatorial race. One problem The Worm hadn't foreseen is that JJ, the new lead prosecutor, is Poppy's husband.

The trial pits Max Cline against JJ McClure when Max returns to the courtroom as a defense attorney. It also becomes a stumping ground for political ambitions as Poppy capitalizes on her husband's case and the Worm spins the case to his advantage and out of Poppy's reach.

Soon a teen supermodel emerges from the vying mass of personalities. Only now learning that the accused is her long-lost brother, a petty felon who has spent his life bouncing from foster case to detention center, she offers to fund his defense.

Nothing Lost sets itself up as a fast-paced legal thriller, but it gets stuck in irrelevant details. Dunne's tongue-in-cheek, long-winded commentaries undermine the story's emotional appeal.

Speaking of the accused's murder of Parlance, Dunne writes, "He skinned somebody alive. That takes work. You really have to mean it. It's not like you lose your temper and clip somebody . . . It's not like you knock up someone, you've already got a wife, maybe two, you never got divorced, what's the big deal about bigamy, you think whacking the new girl will solve the problem. It's not even you want to see what it feels like . . ."

Such irreverence feels frivolous.

Dunne sets up characters that seem at first to have substance, but are so highly chiseled into props that they end up paper-thin. As he tosses in more players and meanders further into the convoluted and sordid past of his characters, the purpose of the story becomes less clear and the actors become zombies propelled through the book by Dunne's cynical sense of satire.

It's as if Dunne simply gives up on the story. Rather than develop a single story line to fruition, he throws a dozen sketches at readers to see what will stick, filling in narrative gaps with an excess of background and opting for a convenient ending.

Just when we are holding onto the last thread of hope that we'll get some vestige of a legal thriller, we find a summary of a few testimonies and a lot of extracurricular posturing and impropriety.

Nothing Lost, published posthumously, is Dunne's 12th and final book. Compared to earlier works like True Confessions (1977) or Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982), it feels like a write-off. It is disposable literature cluttered with a flurry of details and, sadly, lacking in substance.

Alex Gorelik is a freelance writer living in Denver.