FALLING BODIES by Andrew Mark, Putnam, 259 pages, hardcover, $22.95.

Coping with grief, finding a new love, and suspense are all delightfully at the heart of this debut novel by Mainer Andrew Mark. The writing is warmly introspective, and it has a rhythm and flow that sparkle.

The plot centers around Jackson Tate, a former physics professor and now a wanderer who is trying to cope with the grief of losing his family, as well as guilt over some mysterious circumstance of their deaths. His wanderings lead him to the coast of Maine where “he had hit the shore here like a ship on a reef. The engine in his van had finally quit dieseling, and he was off to pace the mile or two of beach that lay at the end of the state road. There was no more road left to drive.”

When his aging van conks out, Jackson takes up temporary residence in a bed-and-breakfast where he becomes a handyman for the inn’s owner, Olivia Faraday, who has a shadow of grief behind her eyes. So begins an unplanned love as each gains strength from the other while they struggle to manage their anguish. Gradually, their stories come out, but there still lurks an unnamed event that is causing Jackson to have nightmares.

So Jackson must come to terms with his grief and ultimately must come to grips with the incident that has him so loaded with guilt, even as he falls in love with the pretty innkeeper. And Livvy, who is married — her husband has Alzheimer’s disease, it turns out — must come to grips with her own guilt as she falls in love with Jackson.

The suspense is in the incident in Jackson’s past life.

The main characters are nicely developed, and Mark has a talent for description, dialogue and scene building. His writing is fresh and clear as a mountain stream racing over smooth rocks to reach a bottom pool. See how he pictures Jackson’s nomadic driving to escape the nightmare past:

“Back roads forced him to concentrate on his driving and gave him snapshot glimpses of picturesque towns, the comforting illusion of other people’s calm lives. He didn’t mind at all even if he was stuck behind a farmer in his tractor or an Amish family in their horse and buggy. The old highway system ran like veins over the landscape.”

And Mark is equally adept in bringing the reader deep into the abstracts of the mind and the heart. For example:

“Grieving was as mysterious a process as falling in love. Somewhere, deep inside the brain, grief and love were wedded and wound serpentine around each other. Wasn’t there a component of grief in loving someone? Implicit in the emotional contract between two people is that someday it will end: One will grieve for the other …”

Mark tosses in an extraneous element as he opens each chapter with a quotation from a scientist or philosopher. While these may be mildly interesting, they add nothing to the plot and can easily be skipped. Presumably, they are there to lend a professorial air to the writing, when in fact they simply irritate.

Mark, a New York writer who has been a teacher and part-time tutor while he tried to write novels, speaks of how he came to Maine to write this book. “Maine was probably the least New Yorker-friendly. It’s not the people, it’s the way it gets so completely dark at night that you feel in your bones that Stephen King is down in the basement, dismembering things.” He and his writer wife, Kelli Pryor, house-sat in their first winter in southern Maine and then took up residence themselves in Limerick.

Although his main character is a scientist, Mark is not. His college work was in novel writing, in contrast to Jackson Tate. But he makes of Jackson much more than a scientist and a teacher. He is a sketcher. And early on, when he sketches to release emotions, Livvy sees the drawings he is doing and says:

“But a scientist who sketches? Isn’t that some sort of sacrilege?”

And Jackson replies:

“It’s just something I do when I feel like it, that’s all. My dad used to draw to keep me quiet on the train or on car trips.” And Mark goes on to describe how Tate took the talent and used it “for science first.”

“An imagination is a scientist’s greatest tool,” Mark tells us.

And imagination is certainly a lively tool that Mark uses in this scintillating debut novel.

Bill Roach is a freelance writer with Maine roots who now lives in Florida.