DIRTY WORK, by Stuart Woods, Putnam, New York, 317 pages, hardcover, $25.95.

Cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington returns for the ninth time in the latest release by veteran mystery writer Stuart Woods.

In this typically fast-paced novel by the Mount Desert Island summer resident, Barrington is recruited to do a bit of “dirty work” by the high-priced law firm Woodman & Weld. He needs to get some incriminating photos for an important, divorce-minded client of her philandering husband.

That assignment is blown by an incompetent new photographer, and suddenly Barrington, along with his ex-partner, NYPD Lt. Dino Bacchetti, find themselves caught in a whirl of international espionage. Especially after Barrington’s old flame, the British spook Carpenter (introduced in 2002’s “The Short Forever”), shows up in the Big Apple.

“Dirty Work” is fairly predictable, without a lot of surprises, and its action turns on too many improbabilities. That being said, it’s still a fun, painless read, with crackling dialogue, a healthy dollop of sex and an appropriate amount of violence. – Dale McGarrigle

MRS. ROBERTO OR THE WIDOWY WORRIES OF THE MOOSEPATH LEAGUE, by Van Reid, Viking, New York, 2003, 339 pages, $25.95.

Van Reid has a devoted following for his retro-novels. “Mrs. Roberto” is the fourth and most recent of his books about the adventures of the Moosepath League, a group of Portland eccentrics at the end of the 19th century who get into, well, scrapes. Interesting and occasionally dangerous and always amusing escapades seem to follow them about; in “Mrs. Roberto” those include the attempted rescue of a beautiful and mysterious “ascensionist;” curing a glum pig; saving a policeman from a falling piano; and heroically fighting a fire in an icehouse.

Reid treats plot as if he were fishing: dangling a multitude of hooks, he methodically checks them one by one and then goes back to the first one and starts over again. Finally all the hooks catch something, the lines are reeled in, and the Moosepath League is free to think about its next adventure.

These novels are hard not to like: they’re peopled by Dickensian characters who are mostly well-meaning if bumbling; the women are stalwart and good-humored; the children adorable; and even the villains are really not so bad after all. Virtue is rewarded, evil is punished, lovers are united, and all ends well.

In short, it’s fiction written as though fiction hadn’t changed since the late 1800s. Reid’s narrator seems to lack a modern sensibility; readers hoping for irony or sophistication in their fiction had best look elsewhere. They’ll also need a taste for 19th century diction and syntax: “Characteristically dressed in the habiliments of the laboring class, Thaddeus looked more pugnacious than usual as he watched the traffic on Commercial Street; the fractious nature of his appearance was a little amplified by profound concern and a hint of annoyance.”

This is a comfort book, easy to digest, not too spicy, no troublesome bones to gnaw on or flavors to be guessed at. Van Reid assures us (as long as we’re willing to suspend our disbelief) that the world’s a friendly place, a vanilla-ice-cream kind of place, a place of pleasant dreams and sunshiny mornings. – Margery Y. Irvine

THE SHAPE OF DARK, by Sally Martin, S. A. Martin Associates, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, 2002, 369 pages.

On page 232 of Sally Martin’s novel “The Shape of Dark,” her plucky protagonist Kate Hammond “wondered how many crises could occur in one afternoon.” The reader may be wondering as well; after all, in just the first 100 pages of the book, Kate and her community of Cape Mariana, Maine, have been through bombs, child abuse, assaults, murder, rape, and – in general – villainy of all sorts. That leaves another 269 pages for more of the above, with space left for kidnapping, false identities, battles at sea, and, just for good measure, a couple more murders. In “The Shape of Dark,” shots really do ring out – often.

Good thing Kate is up to it all; not only is she plucky, but gorgeous, too: “Her red-gold hair was once again lustrous and curled smoothly around her shoulders, while clear aqua eyes framed with unusually dark eyelashes were set above a straight nose and soft generous lips.” The other women in the book are similarly endowed: Tikka has “silver-blond hair” and “startling green eyes”; Susan has “long blond hair,” “sculpted cheekbones and delicate features.” No wonder every good-looking man in Cape Mariana (and just about all the men in Cape Mariana are good-looking and unmarried) falls instantly in love.

Readers might have trouble catching their breaths, what with all the crises and love affairs. They won’t be troubled by ambiguity, though: the good guys are really, really good, and the bad guys’ black hats don’t even have white bands. Neither will they be troubled by surprising or unfamiliar language: restaurants are “charming,” “elegant,” “candlelit”; lobster boats are “picturesque”; tea is “fragrant” and coffee is “aromatic.”

The press release accompanying the review copy of “The Shape of Dark” informs us that Sally Martin plans a trilogy of Cape Mariana novels; it’s hard to imagine a crisis or clich? left unturned. – Margery Y. Irvine

FREEDOM BAY, by B.J. Bellemare, 1st books, 2002 425 pages.

It’s hard to get a novel published these days; heck, it’s just as hard to find an agent. So thousands – millions? – of perfectly good books go unread by all but their authors’ families because reputable publishers are unwilling to take a chance on someone who might just turn out to be the next Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel.

Pity the poor writers: possessed of lively wits, active imaginations, carefully nurtured skills, they find themselves frustrated at every turn. Self-publishing, though, has proven to be the answer for the committed, the creative, the inspired.

And then there’s B.J. Bellemare.

Her novel, “Freedom Bay,” opens on Sept. 11, 2001, but after the first page, the book goes back to the coast of Maine in 1968 to trace the lives, in excruciating detail, of the members of an extended family as they (according to the book jacket) “pursue the most valuable, yet complicated liberty of all – personal freedom.”

The book has no plot to speak of, just the unraveling of domestic incidents; ironically, the vaunted “personal freedom” generally consists of meeting Mr. or Ms. Right and walking into the sunset hand in hand. The characters are uninteresting and flat, the dialogue wooden (“‘My dear Stella, I am a moth drawn by your flame. I find myself lying sleepless, thinking of you.'”), hundreds of exclamation points taking the place of the natural stresses and rhythms of the language.

Readers could probably forgive Bellemare a lot of that sort of thing, however, if she were only able to write, with any degree of facility or competence, the English language. I don’t think it’s too much to expect that novelists, self-published or not, who expect readers to pay for their books, know basic grammar. Evidently, this writer, who, we are told, has earned a degree in English from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, never heard of dangling modifiers; has never learned to punctuate compound sentences, is unaware that there’s such a thing as the objective case; doesn’t know that single quotation marks follow double ones; and can’t distinguish between “palette” and “palate,” between “exhaustive” and “exhausting,” between “influence” and “affluence.”

There must be a better use for paper, for, as Joyce Kilmer reminds us, only God can make a tree. His was the poem, if you’ll remember, with the immortal line, “Poems are made by fools like me.” Or, as B.J. Bellemare would doubtless have written, “by fools like I.” – By Margery Y. Irvine