NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN

“Nine Mile Bridge: Three Years in the Maine Woods” (Islandport Press, $15.99), by Helen Hamlin is a reissue of Helen Hamlin’s bestselling memoir first published in 1945. A Fort Kent native from a family of Maine game wardens, Hamlin took a job teaching school at a remote Maine lumber camp in the 1930s. At age 20, she set out for Churchill Depot at the headwaters of the Allagash River.

“Helen Hamlin’s descriptions vividly illuminate images of a vast, remote, lonely and heavily forested land of timber and wildlife on which a rugged, hardworking culture depended for its survival,” wrote Dean B. Bennett, author of “The Wilderness from Chamberlain Farm,” in the foreword to the new edition of the North Woods classic. “Her book records in human terms details of life in our northern forest that would otherwise fade from our collective memory and be lost forever.”

POCKET GUIDE

“Bygone Backwoods: A Postcard Tour of Rustic New England” (Down East Books, $12.95), by Earl Brechlin, just about fits in the back pocket and provides a unique tour of rustic New England through stark, pastel-hued postcards dating back at least a century. The 100 penny postcards offer a glimpse of a simpler time. In one, a young woman, wearing a white mutton-sleeved blouse and long skirt, is pictured hauling in a fish from Attean Lake in Jackman. “We are all well. Hoping this will find you the same, from James Smith,” is scrawled on the card.

Earl Brechlin, editor of the Mount Desert Islander based in Bar Harbor and a Maine Registered Guide, wrote and compiled “Bygone Backwoods: A Postcard Tour of Rustic New England” as well as two previous volumes featuring antique postcards from Bar Harbor and Boston. Colorful, informative vignettes about rustic life in New England complement the postcards.

TAUT THRILLER

“In Shadows” (Bantam Dell, $10.99), by Chandler McGrew, is partially set in the fictional Maine town of Crowley. Detective Jake Crowley has run far away from his Maine hometown. But a bizarre shootout in Galveston, Texas, finally draws him back to the Pine Tree State: to a woman he can barely face, to the unsolved mystery of his mother’s murder, to a family curse and a valley that’s fallen under the spell of a serial killer.

In Crowley, a sparsely populated hamlet, 13-year-old Pierce Morin, was born blind and deaf. He possesses a gift: he can hear evil whispering and knows an elusive, deadly force is stalking the people he loves…

For Jake, redemption lies in unlocking Pierce’s gifts and hoping the boy can show him the way to stop the terrors that plague him. But while young Pierce can begin the search, only Jake can finish it by dealing with the evil and claiming both their birthrights.