BLACK OUT.

Lisa Unger. Crown. 368 pages. $23.

Anybody who has cracked open a mystery novel in the last 25 years knows there are two Floridas: The sunny, pastel-hued, happy Walt Disney Florida and the place teeming with lunatics in trailer parks and bodies in the sawgrass.

Kudos to Lisa Unger for venturing onto such well-trod ground with a novel that takes an especially dark look at the state's underbelly. While her third book doesn't always work -- it's prone near the end to cartoonish resolutions -- it still boasts a largely gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose.

''There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance,'' Annie Powers, Unger's protagonist, observes early on. ``Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life.''

Annie is a woman with a murky past, the monstrous details of which emerge slowly, measured out like spent bullet casings tossed along a dark road. She has a different name now than she used to have. She has a sweet 4-year-old daughter named Victory and a supportive husband with a mysterious job that requires him to disappear for long stretches.

Gradually, painfully, Annie fills in the blanks. She was somehow involved with a notorious serial killer. Her father abandoned her. Her mother was a fragile madwoman. And despite Herculean efforts to wall off those terrible chapters, Annie's past returns to stalk her.

Unger takes on the challenging task of telling Annie's story in double-flashback style. In the present, Annie is aboard a cargo ship on the open ocean, fleeing for her life. This is where the book starts: ``Today something interesting happened. I died.''

In the first series of flashbacks, she is living her pampered, post-trauma life with husband and daughter in a seaside house with all the amenities. In the second, she is growing up with her mother, who has dragged her to a Florida trailer park on what appears to be a lunatic's mission.

Unger skillfully weaves these three narratives to create the perfect razor's edge of tension.

The book falters when it's time for Unger to complete the multipart puzzle she has constructed. She doesn't cut corners so much as force interlocking scenarios that are just a bit too far-fetched. Sadly, these missteps threaten to overshadow the book's disturbing core, which is rewarding in a darkly voyeuristic way: the gruesomely realistic tale of a troubled teen's descent into a codependent hell on Earth.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins reviewed this book for The Associated Press.

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