DEAD MAN FALLING

Ever read one of those pregnant paragraphs in the newspaper and become convinced beyond all reasoning that you knew the unidentified people it was about? Diana Westover, lapping up her morning paper, reads a story headlined ``Human Leg Bone Found in Trash,'' and feels suddenly positive that the leg belongs to the half-brother she hasn't seen in two months. The police in bucolic Ormsby, New York, laugh her off, and there isn't a private eye within shouting distance, so when a dismembered arm turns up 90 miles away, she goes to see Mac Parris, a filmmaker who finds wolverines preferable to human subjects. Mac's been in retreat from the human race, in fact, ever since a horrific encounter with a bogus activist left his young wife and son dead 30 years ago. But Diana's certain, in that inscrutable way of hers, that he's the man for the job, and together they trace Tony Jakowski to equally quiet Brazelton, where he evidently got in with the wrong crowd at the public library. Sit still through the lackadaisical, maddeningly intuitive detective work, and you'll get to watch Mac exact a lovingly detailed vengeance for Tony. It's as if Silvis (Under the Rainbow, 1993, etc.) needed to rub his hero raw before allowing him a frightful release.