Rosamunde Pilcher has a secret.While her peers...

Rosamunde Pilcher has a secret.

While her peers strain to outdo one another in outrage--carnage, sleaze, the Pudding that ate Chicago--Pilcher brazenly dares to ground her novels in virtue.

It’s a quaint notion, and it sells. Oh, does it sell! Pilcher’s “The Shell Seekers” sojurned for an astounding 101 weeks on the best-seller list. Now September (A Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s: $22.95; 536 pp.) has debuted at No. 1 and bids fair to knock the socks off its crasser competition.

Lilting along at the pace of a sweet-flowing burn, “September” gathers its characters, lingers long enough to establish familiarity, then nudges them toward a rendezvous in Scotland’s gateway country. The occasion is a grand coming-out dance for a neighbor’s daughter in a season unknown to tourists--a russet round of grouse shooting, hunt balls and an errant ray or two of sunshine.

Airing kilt and tartan in anticipation are staunch, successful Edmund Aird; his mother Vi, demon gardener and clan dowager; his second wife Virginia; his daughter Alexa, coming up from London for the ball, swain in tow. (Who can resist a lass whose hair is “the colour of the best marmalade”?) Then there are Archie and Isobel Blair (Lord and Lady Balmerino), he of the aluminum leg (wounded in Ulster), she of the practicality essential to preservation of the family estate through thin times. And Archie’s sister, the beguiling, exotic Pandora, returning to Scotland after 20 years’ exile.

Gently jarring are the frailties inherent in even the sturdiest of families: a lang-syne-but-never-forgiven infidelity; a balky son; a daft, malicious ex-maid.

Mainly, though, there is an abiding feel for person and place. Despite the leisurely pace, Pilcher can sketch character or croft with the economy and precision of Picasso--and then challenge you not to care.

Come ball night, problems predictably are paired with solutions--save one, decidedly unpredictable: a shocker with style.

Pilcher’s secret, then? As a jaded outsider is moved to note toward the end of “September,” it is the spectacle of “family, friends, neighbours, involved and interdependent.” Now there’s a twist.