BOOK REVIEW : True Story Reads Like a Whodunit : CRUEL DOUBT <i> by Joe McGinniss</i> , Simon & Schuster, $25, 460 pages

True crime is a hot commodity nowadays, and sometimes it seems as if editors and producers are canvassing the newspaper headlines in an effort to corner the market on murder and mayhem. But let’s face it--Joe McGinniss is the franchise, and in his latest account, “Cruel Doubt,” he shows us why.

“Cruel Doubt” is the story of the Von Stein family, which easily qualifies as the most dysfunctional family in America. One steamy night in 1988, someone clubbed and stabbed Lieth Von Stein to death in his rural North Carolina home and nearly managed to kill Bonnie Von Stein too. Von Stein’s teen-age stepdaughter, Angela, slept through the attack in a bedroom a few feet away; his stepson, Chris, was playing cards with some chums at North Carolina State.

Who killed Von Stein? The first two-thirds of “Cruel Doubt” are devoted to the investigation of the crime, and it turns out to be a lurid psychological thriller and a detective story with all the intriguing detail of a classic whodunit.

Almost immediately, the shadow of suspicion falls on the other victim herself as well as on her children, and it’s hardly surprising: The Von Steins were a troubled and troubling crowd.

Lieth Von Stein, who had recently inherited a fortune, was a solitary drinker who put away a case of beer every weekend. Bonnie Von Stein kept 13 cats and a pet rooster with whom she liked to watch TV late into the night. Chris was devoted to both drugs and the game of Dungeons and Dragons, which he played with his cohorts in the steam tunnels under the college campus. And Angela was an aloof young woman who cried not at all when she awoke to find her stepfather dead and her mother half-dead--but wept openly when their attacker was sentenced to die.

At times, the narrative--like the police work itself--seems to meander around the crime, but we begin to perceive a purposeful spiraling as we draw closer and closer to the truth, or at least the version of the truth that ultimately emerged in the courtroom.

What is most impressive about “Cruel Doubt” is the author’s ability to infuse a well-reported crime story with genuine suspense. And even if you recall the media coverage, the book still offers plenty of shocks and surprises.

McGinniss is also adept at evoking the colorful personalities and hothouse environment of the rural South, where back-fence gossips bring in convictions more quickly than judge or jury and where trials are conducted by a cadre of chummy lawyers who literally grew up together in the backwater towns where the story unfolds.

When the judge in the Von Stein case complained that the district attorney was moving too slowly, for example, his colleague explains: “He’s just a good ‘ol boy from Sampson County, and he’s talkin’ as fast as he can.”

The book offers a startlingly intimate profile of the Von Steins and the various miseries that seemed to build toward the Walpurgisnacht of Lieth’s murder.

But McGinniss, who was once sued by former Army doctor Jeffrey MacDonald over the convicted murderer’s depiction in “Fatal Vision,” insists that he made no promises to the family.

“What she wanted from me,” McGinniss writes of Bonnie Von Stein, who approached McGinniss to tell her story after reading “Fatal Vision,” “was something more complex and harder to provide than money or celebrity.”

What Bonnie Von Stein wanted was the truth, or so she says. “I will settle for no less than a conviction on cold hard evidence,” she confided in her own notes. “ Facts must speak, not circumstances.”

But McGinniss demonstrates that truth in the Von Stein case is a tantalizing collection Rashomon-like what-ifs. Rather he gives us plenty of scary scenarios of what might have happened that night in the Von Stein home. In the end, the darkest of the mysteries remain. “There is a lot yet in this story,” says Bonnie Von Stein’s psychiatrist, “that’s untold.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Asya” by Michael Ignatieff (Alfred A. Knopf).