Fans of the Moosepath League, rejoice! The bumbling, goodhearted trio of Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump are back after an eight-year hiatus. Moss Farm (Moosepath Press, Edgecomb, Maine; paperback; 276 pages; $14 ) is Van Reid’s sixth book in the series of Victorian comedies featuring the Portland gentlemen’s club whose members gallantly serve wherever they are needed, be it rescuing beautiful balloonists or counseling downhearted pigs.

Reid has earned a devoted following with his eccentric characters, multiple, intersecting plots, and rich descriptions of nineteenth-century Maine. His gentle humor and vivid period prose — he is frequently compared to Charles Dickens — are rare in contemporary literature.

Moss Farm finds Tobias Walton and Sundry Moss confronting romantic entanglements and ghosts on the Moss family farm in Edgecomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues, Matthew Ephram, Christopher Eagleton, and Joseph Thump, set out to deliver a letter, a surprisingly complicated task that unfolds like a literary version of a Rube Goldberg puzzle. —Virginia M. Wright