`TRIGGERMAN'S DANCE' STEPS A BIT TOO CAREFULLY.

Byline: Richard Berstein The New York Times

Title: ``The Triggerman's Dance''

Author: T. Jefferson Parker

Data: 350 pages, Hyperion; $21.95

Our rating: Three Stars

Orange County, wealthy and bankrupt, is a kind of spiritually distilled America, a place of mythic, reckless excess: of paranoia, nativism, vulgarity, of parvenu palaces and tract houses inhabited by dreamers and fanatics. That, anyway, is the literary pretense of T. Jefferson Parker's noteworthy contribution to this year's selection of summer thrillers.

``The Triggerman's Dance'' is a good one, a layered, exciting yarn whose characters' proximity to the stereotypes of the California escapist genre is a forgivable flaw, given Parker's obvious talent for making them so full-blooded, so sharply defined, so rich in vernacular eloquence.

The story starts with the murder of Rebecca Harris, a 22-year-old gofer at the local newspaper, the Orange County Journal, shot down in the parking lot while getting into somebody else's car. Rebecca, we quickly learn, was an accidental victim: the assassin's real target was Susan Baum, a brash and arrogant columnist for the newspaper, originally from back East, whose reckless way with the facts and unhindered opinions have made her plenty of enemies.

Soon Joshua Weinstein, an FBI special agent, arrives at the scene of the crime with a special reason for solving this particular murder. Rebecca was his fiancee.

In those first few pages, Parker establishes ``The Triggerman's Dance'' as an atmospheric and well-written piece of work, a decided cut above the average in a universe of stories whose gaps in logic are often as wide as the California desert.

Parker does not entirely escape this problem; close examination of his novel reveals, here and there, some dubious motivations and implausible twists of plot. Baum, for example, the intended murder victim, is so jumpy after Rebecca's killing that she won't meet a federal investigator at a restaurant unless she sits with her back to the wall so she can keep her eyes on the door.

Yet this same Baum is pretty easily persuaded to go into the very home of the man she suspects has tried to murder her. Well, maybe as feisty, as angry and as self-righteous a person as Susan Baum would have done that, and, in any case, plausible or not, her entrance into the lion's den makes for a taut and suspenseful climax.

In the meantime, we have gotten pretty well acquainted with several others important to the story. In addition to the mournful and tortured Joshua Weinstein, there is John Menden, who, it turns out, also had a special relationship to the deceased Rebecca. He finds himself, nonetheless, a part of Weinstein's maniacal determination to avenge his fiancee's death.

Parker also gives us a classy, quick-witted, vulnerable tomboy heroine named Valerie, who is just as good at shooting quail as she is at the game of seduction.

And there is one Lane Fargo, this novel's henchman, whose stereotypical bad-guy-ness again is vindicated by the mere fact that the stereotype is so well drawn. Fargo is smart, very smart, which makes him all the more menacing.

``What, do you mumble and blush every time someone tries to like you?'' he asks, interrogating Menden, the FBI mole of whom he is suspicious. ``Or do you act like you're acting now, all defensive?''

Most important, there is Fargo's boss, and Valerie's father, Vann Holt, a former legend at the local office of the FBI who left the agency, made lots of money in the private security business and lives the life of a Nietzschean superman on an enormous fenced-in compound he has built overlooking the Pacific.

Holt's son was killed by a young Latino gang member for whom Susan Baum developed a journalistic sympathy, which, in turn, transformed Holt into an embittered, vengeful paladin given to racist diatribes on the loss of American greatness to hordes of dark-skinned immigrants.

Parker turns the neat trick of making this commanding general of a private right-wing militia both scary and admirable at the same time.

It would be much too much to compare Parker to Joseph Conrad; ``The Triggerman's Dance'' is a tough, atmospheric page-turner, not a great work of literature.

And yet, there is more than just a bit of Kurtz in Vann Holt's Orange County heart of darkness. He is the kind of man who looks at people ``with all the consuming focus of his character.'' When he walks, he moves ``deliberately, like a man willing to learn something with every step.''

``We live in an ailing republic,'' he is given to saying. ``Too many people. Too few values. Too much fear. Too many lies. All the spirit pounded down to mediocrity. My last years have been given over to work and hatred - you all know that.'' Vann, in short, is a solid tragic hero, a character who lifts Parker's book beyond the usual realm of the California thriller.

``The Triggerman's Dance'' has the psychological and moral complexity of a good novel of the American dark. Parker only skims the seas of fictional exploration, scrambling back to the safe shore of his chosen genre whenever he starts to go deep.

It is as if he is afraid of drowning. There is nothing wrong with these results, but one has the feeling that Parker has the vision and the talent to do well if he ever decides to take a deeper plunge.

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Photo: (1--2) T. Jefferson Parker has an atmospheric, ab sorbing mystery in ``The Triggerman's Dance.''