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

TOOL AND DIE, by Sarah Graves, Bantam, New York, 2005, hardcover, 274 pages, $22.

If there’s more mayhem way Down East, Sarah Graves must be back.

Once again, the Eastport author sets the eighth installment in her “Home Repair is Homicide” series in her hometown. Graves’ novels are always a hoot because of the way they blend the escapism of a whodunit with something any Mainer can use – home-repair hints.

This time around, Graves’ protagonist, financier-turned-busybody Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree finds herself roped into aiding her manic housekeeper, Bella Diamond, who has been receiving anonymous threatening notes.

Not that Jake doesn’t have enough on her plate. Her son Sam, a recovered substance abuser, has dropped his sensible girlfriend for a gold-digging floozy. The extended family of her long-lost father, a recently pardoned fugitive, is descending on Eastport at its busiest time of year, the Fourth of July, to visit him. And her 200-year-old Federalist house is in no shape to receive visitors.

Anyway, the most likely culprit is found dead. It’s up to Jake and her best friend, Ellie White, to figure out how the notes and the murder are linked, and soon they’re off on another caper with many twists, turns and bumps, much like the roads in Washington County itself.

The entertaining “Tool and Die” will keep most mystery readers guessing until nearly the end. Graves ties up things pretty neatly, but there’s still plenty to explore in the lives of her characters in her next novel.

BY CHUCK VEEDER

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

BANGOR AND AROOSTOOK RAILROAD: IN COLOR, by Jerry Angier, Morning Sun Books, Scotch Plains, N.J., 2004, $59.95.

These days, it is the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic that toils from a southern terminus at Searsport to northern Maine. If one lives in just the right spot and steps outside at exactly the right time in the evening, the air horn of a diesel at a crossing may waft faintly through the darkness. The Montreal, Maine & Atlantic may be the name painted on the engines, but to most Mainers, those twin strips of shiny steel pointing north will always belong to the Bangor and Aroostook.

Jerry Angier has produced a book that is awash in color pictures. It is an illustrated love letter to a railroad and the people who ran it. It’s about a railroad that ran through our towns and was run by our friends and neighbors. For 111 years, the Bangor and Aroostook moved Maine freight and Maine people to and from Aroostook County. In its rise and long, slow descent, you can see the victories and the struggles of Maine north of Bangor.

In addition to 120 pages of color pictures, the book contains a roster of the Bangor and Aroostook diesel engines from October 1947 through January 2002 and a map of the original road. From the background data, we learn that in the month of March 1945, 10,000 cars of potatoes were shipped from northern Maine. In 1951, the editors of Railroad Magazine named the Bangor and Aroostook the “Railroad of the Year.”

The author’s organization makes it easy to take a trip on the railroad. Starting at the Searsport docks, we turn the pages, picture by picture until reaching St. Francis. We travel the forgotten branch to Greenville. We see the last trains going up the old main line to Houlton, Presque Isle and Van Buren. When that was abandoned, the cut-off from Oakfield through Squa Pan became the mainline.

The book’s cost of $59.95 may cause hesitation in some quarters. Still, for the grownup that, as a child, lay abed in the dark thrilling to the whistle of a steam engine or the horn of a diesel passing in the distance, it is a small price to pay for a trip back in time.

“Bangor and Aroostook Railroad: In Color” can be purchased directly from Jerry Angier at 772-2333 and is also available at BookMarc’s, 78 Harlow St., Bangor. 942-3206.

BY CHUCK VEEDER

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

A SPLENDID MADNESS: A MAN-A BOAT-A LOVE STORY, by Thomas Froncek, Sheridan House Publishers, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 2004, $23.95.

Thomas Froncek is proof that you don’t have to live on the coast of Maine to get very badly bitten by the boating bug. The fact that he lived near the west bank of the Hudson River in lower New York state was undoubtedly a contributing factor. It’s a different beauty from Maine’s spruce-darkened islands, but it’s still nature wearing another of her spectacular coats. Besides, if a person has any susceptibility to such an illness, a daily drive by a fleet of boats bobbing calmly in a picturesque harbor is certain to infect.

This is the classic story: Man sees boat. Man thinks boat might be a neat idea. Time goes by and man really, really needs boat. Finally, man gets boat and is supremely happy, sort of. Of course, like any red-blooded sailor, man is sooner rather than later lusting after larger boat.

The story is so common that it leads the reader to ponder the reason for the book at all. If the author, a writer, had decided to build the boat himself, then you may have a story worth writing and reading. This book begs the question: Did the publisher wonder one day if it needed a book on sailing in its lineup? Deciding in the affirmative, “A Splendid Madness” was commissioned.

That said, it would be wonderful if all wannabe sailors took the precautions that Froncek did. The author, who now makes his home in southern Maine, details the considerable time spent taking sailing lessons and crewing on other peoples’ boats to gain experience. By the time he got his own boat, he had grown in confidence and ability. Of course, that confidence sometimes leads to circumstances that cause the sailor to return home considerably less relaxed than when he left.

The area in which he sailed his boat creates, for this reader, the main interest in the book. Just a few miles north of the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River opens up to a 3-mile width at Haverstraw Bay. At the north end of that bay lie the narrows at Stony Point and, above there, the fabled Hudson Highlands. There is no escaping the beauty of the Highlands that rise on each side of the river. This is the country of West Point and Washington Irving; Benedict Arnold and “The Headless Horseman.” Froncek is at his best when describing the wonders of the area.

Ultimately, the reader has to decide whether it is better to read about someone else sailing his boat or to buy one’s own boat and set out. It’s cheaper to buy the book, but a lot more fun if it’s your own boat.