The key to a successful mystery these days is setting. Agatha Christie and Murder, She Wrote exhausted all the possible plots and motives long ago. It's no longer a matter of whodunnit, but where and with whom.

David Willis McCullough seems to understand the importance of setting--his second novel, Point No-Point has a strong sense of place. The story is set in a small Hudson River Town just far enough north of New York City to be called upstate.

In another life, Quarryville could be the Westchester county version of Twin Peaks. Bizarre characters, just a little too menacing to be called eccentric, fill the town. And if you ignore the rusting foundry and Civil War munitions plants, you can get a really beautiful view of the Hudson River.

But beneath a quaint exterior, Quarryville is desperately trying to hide something.

As always happens in mysteries about small towns with secrets, a stranger comes to town. Not the usual detective type, Ziza Todd is a cross between Father Brown and Nancy Drew. A committee of local clergy invited this "irreverent reverend" to Quarryville to teach an interdenominational Sunday School class. It doesn't take long before she is saving more than souls.

Point No-Point

by David Willis McCullough

Viking

$19.00

All of a sudden, three successive deaths shake-up the slumbering small town. First a high school student, then a homeless man and finally Adele Baraclough the local art patron are all found dead. The murders would seem unrelated except for the JUST ASK MONTY campaign pin that graces each corpse. Monty Monteagle, the newly-elected reform-minded mayor, is just one of the town's many suspects.

Before she died, Adele Baraclough had plans to develop Quarryville's decaying riverfront. But typical of most upstate riverside towns, so does just about everyone else. No one was about to let Adele turn prime real estate into a museum for an artistic ancestor.

Among the suspects is Lilian Meservey, the jeep-driving town manager, who plans to build riverside condos. On the other hand, muckraking Monty wants to invite in the Environmental Protection Agency and turn everything into low-income housing. Whooten, Adele's architect, has different dreams of an underground museum and "ghost factories." And Fogle, Adele's lawyer, is interested in anything that will make him rich.

All prime suspects, but they are not Quarryville's only guilty citizens. We also encounter the pastors of the town's three churches, who combat for the soul of Quarryville and of Ziza Todd. Don't forget Bob Bramer, the perpetual loser in the mayoral elections and Professor van Runk, the broke Washington Irving scholar who owns a key piece of real estate. Quarryville is too small and too incestuous for everyone not to get involved.

Point No-Point thrives on these bizarre personalities and the world they live in. As a mystery, it is entirely pedestrian, but the novel tries hard to make up for its blandness with an interesting setting.

To truly appreciate what McCullough has done with Quarryville, it may be necessary to live in Westchester county or know someone who does. He has perfectly captures the issues that dominate drawing-room conversations along the Hudson River: land development, the environment, an imagined artistic past and who is sleeping with whom.

If you are from the area, reading Point No-Pointis like returning home and finding Twin Peaks. The mystery is old hat, and probably could have been done better by Agatha or Angela. But Quarryville is something different.