Very creepy, but somewhat creaky

“The Dead Will Tell” (premiering Sunday night on CBS) is an effective creep show involving the familiar story of an amateur sleuth (Anne Heche this time) impelled by supernatural clues to solve an old murder.

It’s somewhat discomfiting to read that the film has been “inspired by the readings of famed psychic James Van Praagh” -- hard to know exactly what that means -- but I suppose that a professed belief in ghosts is no impediment to professional screenwriters turning that belief into a decent creaking-door whodunit.

More important, CBS scored big, ratings-wise, in 2002 with “Living With the Dead,” a telefilm based on Van Praagh’s book “Talking to Heaven,” in which Ted Danson played Van Praagh -- impelled by supernatural clues to solve an old murder. You don’t need a crystal ball to see the word “sequel” forming out of that mist.

Heche plays Emily Parkes, another one of those TV lawyer gals who shows a surprising amount of skin for her line of work. (Is this what they’re teaching them at Harvard?) But this is New Orleans after all -- and really New Orleans, not some Vancouver substitute -- where it’s hot and sort of French and certainly sexy. Her line of work is, in any case, 100% irrelevant to the plot.

One day, hunky new boyfriend Billy (Jonathan LaPaglia) surprises her with an engagement ring, a strangely inscribed antique he happened upon by accident -- or was it? When she puts it on, she begins to have visions, not of ringwraiths, as you might logically expect, or the disembodied eye of Sauron, but an occasionally bloody young woman who seems to want to play hide-and-seek. Emily finds this strange, but obviously she hasn’t been to the movies or turned on the TV lately. Everybody sees dead people nowadays.

Even though she has ample ground to think she might be crazy, having been crazy in her teens, Emily falls in pretty quickly with the Van Praagh party line -- she’s getting messages from the other side -- and sets off like Nancy Drew to uncover a killer. (It’s funny the stock that dead people put in the justice of the living; you’d think they’d take a longer view.) There’s nothing too surprising -- someone’s going to have to have done it, and it’s going to be someone you might not expect (though you are encouraged to suspect nearly everyone), and there will be a one-on-one confrontation between hunter and game right near the end. Will it be Billy’s alcoholic mother (Kathleen Quinlan), his stiff-necked father (David Andrews), the victim’s old boyfriend (Chris Sarandon), the kindly police detective (Gary Grubbs)? Does it matter?

Plenty of people take the spirit world seriously -- Van Praagh has been a favorite guest of Oprah and Larry King and had his own syndicated series, “Beyond With James Van Praagh,” which has since passed from the realm of the living -- and I suppose they will be moved by this essentially harmless entertainment in ways I can only imagine. For the rest of us, it’s enough to say that, apart from the occasional tiresome camera trick, the production makes the cliches work, and where the production falls short, the actors fill in. Quinlan essays a marvelous combination of Southern graces and faults. Heche, after living life awhile in the tabloids, is back as an actress to be reckoned with, subtly musical, deeper than her material and, not least, her own special version of hot stuff.

*

‘The Dead

Will Tell’

Where: CBS

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG S,V (may be unsuitable for young children with advisory for sex and violence)

Anne Heche...Emily Parkes

Jonathan LaPaglia...Billy

Chris Sarandon...Paul Hamlin

Leigh Jones...Marie Sallinger

Kathleen Quinn...Beth

Executive producers, Barbara Lieberman and James Van Praagh. Director, Stephen Kay. Writer, Mark Kruger, Nancy Fichman and Jennifer Hoppe.