Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors or set in the Pine Tree State.

BY DALE MCGARRIGLE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

VANISH, by Tess Gerritsen, Ballantine, New York, 352 pages, hardcover, $24.95.

Things had been going pretty well for Jane Rizzoli. The Boston homicide detective had married Mr. Right, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, and they were expecting their first child.

Then, after an unwise bit of exertion, a very pregnant and overdue Jane finds herself hospitalized. That’s when all hell breaks loose.

Before long, Jane, Gabriel and their friend, medical examiner Maura Isles, find themselves caught up in a case involving sex slaves from Eastern Europe, multiple murders and a cover-up from on high. That doesn’t count the couple learning to be parents while trying to solve this tangled mystery.

Once again, thriller master Gerritsen takes her readers on a fast-paced, wild ride, as they follow the protagonists up and down the Eastern Seaboard as Jane and Gabriel try to chase down key evidence and one last witness, before it and she disappears.

The best-selling author fills in back story through one woman’s journal, as events speed along in the present. In “Vanish,” Gerritsen again keeps readers guessing right up until a shocking ending.

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

SUBURBAN SAFARI: A YEAR ON THE LAWN, by Hannah Holmes; Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2005; hardcover, 264 pages; $24.95.

It’s amazing what goes on right outside the door in the unseen worlds of insects, chipmunks and crows. Hannah Holmes’ “Suburban Safari” recounts excursions into that world, which encompasses her patch of lawn in the suburbs, and she brings the amazement and the facts to life across 12 chatty but well-focused, well-researched essays on the lawn in all seasons.

She looks into the lives of the sow bugs, chickadees, squirrels, spiders and umpteen creatures that depend on the vegetation and soil of her tiny plot of land in South Portland. She adopts a chipmunk by bribing him into the house by stages with sunflower seeds. She monitors the comings and goings of a three-legged squirrel she calls Stumpy. The chipmunk’s name is Cheeky.

Her “biophilia” is one thing, but her agitation with the 21st century American attitude toward the yard is another. The details of the havoc wrought by fertilizers, dogs, cars, and water and septic systems on suburban wildlife are explained in quick, quirky, clever prose, and an entertaining, slightly eccentric, slightly caustic personality invigorates the book and fills out what could be just a hollow mass of facts, but isn’t.

Like her first book, “The Secret Life of Dust,” “Suburban Safari” makes nice afternoon reading for putterers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other amateur naturalists, as well as some pros, no doubt.

THE WILDERNESS, by H.R. Coursen; Just Write Books, Topsham, 2005; 122 pages, trade paperback, $14.95.

H.R. Coursen, quietly one of Maine’s best lyric poets, has also, according to his publisher, written 23 novels. The most recent, “The Wilderness,” is the story of Richard Turnbull, a feisty middle-aged journalist who writes for a small newspaper on Maine’s southern midcoast and dislikes the policies of the Bush presidency.

The book’s early chapters reveal things going badly wrong. Turnbull’s lady friend dumps him. He loses his job. Then an ex-girlfriend invites him to Washington to discuss certain nasty, high-level political shenanigans about which he’s copped some secret information and he gets “detained” by agents of the Homeland Security Patrol.

Then, everything changes. All the electricity in America suddenly winks out in what appears to be a massive Enron-style screw-up. Turnbull finds himself alone in the impending Maine winter, and the story settles into an imagination of what might happen when the power has permanently quit – hunting for food, scavenging for gasoline in deserted garages, piling up firewood, defending the neighborhood, and planning the repopulation of the community.

The story doesn’t find its narrative footing until after the power goes out, at which point the events of the first two chapters become essentially moot and the plot seriously disjointed. How America’s electricity could permanently vanish, disintegrating all political and social order while the rest of the world seems to hum along, is not exactly clear, and some long-winded passages excoriating right-wing politics encourage the suspicion you’re reading a first draft.

But the book steadies itself in its new-wilderness chapters, and its depiction of a coarser, hardier life without most suburban comforts will appeal to some readers, especially those who used to be known as “back-to-the landers.” Turnbull’s flashbacks to his days as a fighter pilot are vivid. And the book’s many passages on the shortcomings of the American political right will warm the cockles of any reader who already thinks Bush has made a mess out of things.