As the author of the well-loved retro-fictions Cordelia Underwood and Mollie Peer, novelist Van Reid traffics in Dickensian adventure, populated by characters with the unlikely names Capital Gaines and Sundry Moss. His third novel, Daniel Plainway, bears the subtitle "The Holiday Haunting Of The Moosepath League," and the book continues Reid's documentation of late 19th-century Maine and the band of accidental do-gooders that has served as the supporting cast in each of his efforts to date. Within the first 100 pages, Reid has established about a half-dozen plotlines, and in each short chapter—designed to mimic the turn-of-the-century serial fiction that is Reid's clear inspiration—he advances one story a tantalizing fraction. The overarching plot concerns the title character, a country lawyer who comes to the Moosepath League with information about a kidnapped five-year-old boy. When he reaches their home city of Portland, however, he finds the league scattered; founder Tobias Walton is helping a Methodist minister locate some Nordic runes before they can be destroyed by the mysterious Broumnage Club, while the rest of the Moosepathians are keeping an aging shipping magnate safe from his leeching nephew. Eventually, all the narrative threads are drawn taut as a romance blooms, the ghosts of Christmas manifest, and diversion is provided by three local drunks who call themselves the Dash-It-All Boys. With all the twists of plot and detailed (if fanciful) early American history, Daniel Plainway is rich but never too dense, reminiscent of Umberto Eco without so many philosophical underpinnings. But Reid does have ideas of his own, beyond the lionization of decent men. Much of the novel is dedicated to the digressive telling of stories, and most of those stories feature recurring themes having to do with the chain of coincidences created by acts of kindness and gross misjudgment of another's character. Daniel Plainway is charming and wholesome, in the tradition of "Gay '90s" entertainment like Meet Me In St. Louis and the Great Brain series of juvenile fiction, but the assured thematic purpose and the elegance of Reid's prose lend his work a satisfying maturity. It's like a children's book for adults.