BLIND PURSUIT.<i> By Matthew F. Jones</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 244 pp., $22</i>

Thrillers hack away at evil, at wrong turns, at guilt and perversity. They gnaw the dilemma of the bad seed, the undesirable element, the fragility of society, slung like a thin skin over the bloodthirsty, the base.

Thrillers can make a reader feel that fragility; they can make a reader look over his shoulder or startle at the knock on the door. People pay good money for this heightened awareness, but the transaction is fraught with expectations that too often demand the writer follow a formula. There must be a heinous crime, there must be suspects, there must be a private detective or a policeman who is just a regular guy. The criminal must be riddled with evil. We must not hear too much from the victim, a helpless animal with no free will.

But Matthew Jones is not a recipe writer. “He churns them out” is one of the nastiest things we can say about any writer. Churning out thrillers would not be the worst work in the world, but it would be a kind of treadmill. It would be bleak.

The author of the thriller “A Single Shot,” the finest portrait of guilt since “Crime and Punishment,” Jones is unpredictable and, therefore, terrifying. His characters are knowable, if changeable and complicated. If you say yes to his use of language (like deciding to read poetry), you will not be able to shake him. “A Single Shot” has that terrible effect of making the reader feel as though he had done it--shot the young girl in the woods and lived with the awful secret until it rotted him from the inside out.

In “Blind Pursuit,” Jennifer Follett, the 8-year-old daughter of wealthy, career-obsessed parents, is kidnapped from her front lawn while waiting for the school bus. Her blond, raw-boned, laconic baby-sitter, Hannah Dray, is responsible for Jennifer at the time, because both parents had left the house at 5:30 a.m. for their high-powered jobs in the city. Jennifer is taken at 6:45 a.m. The book, which opens on Tuesday, ends on Friday at 7:45 a.m. It is written in a series of neatly timed entries whose very rational, inevitable presence betrays the senseless agony they contain.

In fact, the novel is a smorgasbord of agonies, and Jones cuts deeply, acutely, into each one of them. Jennifer’s father, Edmund, for example, at 12:35 a.m. on Wednesday, thinks to himself: “The realization abruptly struck him that the hours he’d actually spent with her had been far fewer than those he’d spent thinking of her while doing other things. He’d not heard her first word, seen her first step. . . . He’d told her ‘not today’ or ‘maybe later’--always believing it, too.” By 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, Edmund imagines hell “as less a fiery, barbaric damnation than, as was his world of the last two days, a static, outwardly beautiful place where infinitely--in every noise, sight, touch, taste, or feeling--inhabitants were confronted by the earthly pain caused by their neglect of the very lives above all others--even their own--God had entrusted them with to love and protect. ‘Give me another chance,’ he mutely wailed. ‘One final opportunity not to waste!’ ”

There is the excruciating guilt of the kidnapper’s wife, who turned a blind eye to his many prior crimes, including the sexual abuse and murder of their own daughter: “Finally she hated herself for so tightly closing her eyes. For blindly embracing the Devil, instead of her earthly lot. For naively exposing to Satan her child, more beautiful, she remembered, than any of his proper photographs of her in which she--not her inwardly regressing daughter, whose symptoms, so much like her own, she had never recognized--took so much pride.”

With its characters who stammer and stutter and change thoughts mid-sentence and moods mid-action, “Blind Pursuit” will leave readers flailing toward certainty. But even when you’ve got the kidnapper right in the cross hairs, you cannot fire: The law stupidly protects him; society protects his rights, even his pursuers do not possess the clear recognition of evil. It is slow to dawn on them.

And Jones is a surgeon throughout the novel, extracting the kernels of relationships, the black holes in his characters’ characters and giving even the smallest cameo roles unforgettable, essential quirks (reminiscent of Hitchcock). The main characters, Det. Frank Levy and his partner, Mike Abbott, are two sides of a whole person; Abbott is coarse while Levy is finely tuned, neurotic and overwrought with self-consciousness. “This poet cop,” one frustrated character describes Levy, “talks in the abstract--never answers a question but with another one or a non sequitur. It wears on you. The job’s hard enough. Tell him to speak English.”

All of Jones’ characters combine thought and speech and gesture to create the flat letters on the page. This author is so attentive to voice, to every wavering indecision, that the dialogue at times reads like a taped transcription. At first, this is frustrating, but then, like eyes adjusting to the darkness, your hearing registers the precision of this method. In the reader’s introduction to Jennifer’s kidnapper, one sees in the very simple way he asks his tremulous, alcoholic wife to lay out his clothes before a lunch engagement that he is capable of any cruelty. One sees this, above all, in the wife’s hesitation and fear: “She stood patiently outside the door until, after nearly three minutes, a cultured male voice politely thanked her.”

Like many before him, Jones uses details in nature to create an ominous and mysterious context: “Like derisive laughter, the brusque chatter of squirrels sounded outside the sun porch.” There is the constant feeling of watching and being watched: “A lazy breeze barely moved the white pine branches, tinged red by the recently risen sun . . . a pair of Cooper’s hawks idly circled, and though the needle-floor barely whispered beneath his light footfalls, a solitary, perching crow cawed to warn of his presence.”

As the detectives circle around their prey, the force of the kidnapper’s evil, his history of evil, becomes in itself blinding. Edmund wakes from a nightmare whose essence is that “mankind, severally and as a group, [is] blameless for the world’s travails in that lives were pre-programmed for goodness, badness, or mediocrity, which no amount of earthly effort could alter. Terrible because what if evil were simply a gene, what sense in teaching a child right from wrong? Awful in that where would be the point in expressing love or hate when the object of same was as directed in his or her behavior as a computer? Horrible as directionless anger.”

Thrillers, even literary ones, are often admired for their plots. Many writers in this genre claim to get their ideas directly from the news. Jones does something the news can never do, and even movies, so carefully orchestrated, can never do. He lets his characters get out of control, go on too long, change their minds like real humans. You really do not know, until the bitter end, whether Jennifer Follett will go home or not. You do not really know, in fact, whether you should leave your house again or not.