Bachelor Brothers

Canadian Richardson's folksy debut, The Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast, won him a cult following among devotees of the middle-aged idyllic (think Northern Exposure or A Year in Provence). The same readership will no doubt enjoy this sequel, another hodgepodge of household hints, homilies, recipes and assorted minutiae dropped like currants into the everyday misadventures of the 50-ish fraternal twins who operate the Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast on an island off the coast of British Columbia. This time the trivia-laden, haphazard plot leads an impractical handyman to the lost combination of the household safe, where the brothers find a sheaf of encrypted poems. Add cute subplots--adventures in parenting by a pair of lesbian lovers, a duplicitous photo shoot arranged by the sociopathic editor of a tattler magazine and the romance between a predatory newspaper columnist and the less repressed of the bachelor twins--and you have the offbeat ingredients of a warm, pleasant pudding of a novel. Already a bestseller in Canada, this homely little book--despite its sometimes strained attempts at humor--ought to find favor below the border with readers whose preciousness-threshold is appropriately high. (Oct.)