PSYCHO FILLER

Just when I thought I couldn't crack another cop novel about the frantic search for a wily serial killer, along comes CHAIN OF EVIDENCE (Hyperion, $22.95) and I'm hooked again. Which is not to say the new thriller by Ridley Pearson is an unequivocal success. But it does prove that with some fresh, shrewd plotting there's still plenty of mileage left in the crime genre's most overworked premise.

Lieut. Joe ''Dart'' Dartelli of the Hartford PD has begun to wonder whether a number of recent suicides were, in fact, disguised homicides. When he discovers the victims were all guilty of violent crimes against women, he's nearly positive he knows the identity of their killer. If Dart's gut feelings prove correct, the murderer is a retired hero cop whose wife was raped and brutally murdered several years earlier.

While Pearson's story is ingenious and plausible from start to finish, his prose is graceless. And his characters are monotonously flat. Joe Dartelli never pops into life, or even, for that matter, coherence. His two women friends are cut from the same cardboard. Ginny Rice, a hacker, exists to keystroke her way to crucial documents accessible only in cyberspace. Dartelli's coworker Abby Lang serves as a convenience of quite another sort: She's here to provide the novel with older woman-younger man sex scenes.

Chain of Evidence clearly had ambitions to be something more than just another psycho killer novel. That it's not is, finally, a major letdown. On the other hand, as pulp fiction this is one hell of a clever job. B-