Women and Ghosts

Women and Ghosts Alison Lurie (Doubleday, $21) In what sounds like a gimmick but works like a charm, Lurie has written nine contemporary ghost tales, each carefully plotted, about women haunted by psychosomatic visions and supernatural beings. A few are funny, others are sad, and only one, ''Counting Sheep,'' is predictable. Where the American-born and -raised Lurie picked up the distracting Briticisms that pepper her writing is a mystery; apart from them, she writes like a literary Pandora. A- -MM