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Harry Robert Stoner, 85, of 51241 County Road 33, died at 2:15 a.m. Saturday in his home after an illness.

Many of them, such as Leon Tubin, love collecting early hi-fi recordings. When Tubin discovers someone has been stealing from his beloved collection, he calls in [Harry Stoner] and points him toward a likely suspect, the bigoted academic Sherwood Loeffler.

[Jonathan Valin]`s writing is so fluid, his dialogue so crisp and his stories so well- plotted that each [Harry Stoner] novel is over too soon. For me, Shamus Award- winning Valin is one of the quickest reads around; the only problem with his books is it seems a waste to invest in his hardbacks when the paperback versions will be available within a few months.

Here's another one that's made the rounds in Baltimore: A couple are honeymooning in the Caribbean, but while they're out for a swim, thieves break into their room and steal all their possessions -- except their toothbrushes and camera. When they arrive back home and develop the film, they see to their horror just what the burglars were doing with those toothbrushes. It's a funny story, true, but according to Mr. [Jan Harold Brunvand], it's also nothing more than another urban legend. -- SUSANNE TROWBRIDGE One of the pleasures of reading is finding a good book and then discovering that the author has written a slew of other titles. After finishing [Jonathan Valin]'s literate, cultured detective story, \"The Music Lovers,\" this sleuthing critic can't wait to track down the previous nine mysteries featuring Cincinnati private eye Harry Stoner. Mr. Valin creates a palpable sense of place and populates it with colorful characters. In Stoner, Mr. Valin has fashioned a detective who has a winning way with a bon mot. Ya gotta respect a gumshoe who describes the art on hospital walls as \"Tums for the eyes.\" -- J. WYNN ROUSUCK

by Donn Kushner Macmillan, $16.95 Dragons guard treasures, and Nonesuch the dragon has learned his trade well at his grandmother's scaley knee. But after his grandmother disappears, Nonesuch embarks on a highly atypical life for a dragon: discovering that when he stops eating he grows smaller, Nonesuch shrinks himself so drastically that he is mistaken for a large green insect. Blown into a monastery chapel, he finds the treasure that he will guard through time, in the hand-painted manuscript of the monk Theophilus. Centuries pass, and now across the Atlantic, Nonesuch defends the bookshop that houses his book. If it means eating an unscrupulous land developer or two, Nonesuch will do it, albeit reluctantly. Donn Kushner, a microbiologist at the University of Ottawa, and author of the award-winning The Violin-Maker's Gift, has provided us with a thoughtful new fable, for young adults and dragon fanciers 12 years old and up. by Jonathan Valin Doubleday, $21.95 Someone named Harry Stoner has messily overdosed in a sleazy Cincinnati motel, and in an effort to avoid the unwanted attentions of the police the motel night clerk calls the real Harry. The private eye discovers that the near- suicide is his old college room-mate Lonnie whom he hasn't seen since 1968. Collecting his comatose old friend, taking him home and then getting together with Lonnie's estranged wife puts Harry back in touch with all the forgotten feelings from the '60s. It also puts him in touch with all the down-and-out old musicians and the drug dealers and users of the Cincinnati underworld. Then Lonnie disappears and the motel night clerk is brutally murdered and both sides of the law decide that Harry is to blame. The mix of the hard- boiled and the sentimental in Valim's seventh Harry Stoner novel is an uneasy one, and Valim's verdict on where all the flowers have gone is pretty harsh.

The \"life's work\" of the title is what a professional football player is supposed to embark on when his career ends. Or so the Cincinnati Cougar owner puts it when he \"releases\" Otto Bluestone, an aging hardrock lineman. Bluestone has keloid zippers on his knees from surgery and little on his mind. Career termination does nothing to improve his temper: \"Otto glared at the sun as if he wanted to punch it out.\" [Harry Stoner] immediately dislikes this narrow-minded menace and well the detective should, for Stoner, ostensibly the hero, just about disappears next to Bluestone. With all his faults and his cold future, Bluestone the angry giant gains our affection by his innate honor and bravery. He appears to be one of the few people in the Ohio Valley not up for sale. And when it comes to finding a fellow lineman in a jam, he leads and Stoner follows.

The idea is compelling, and Mr. [Arthur Mather] works it out very nicely. As a writer, he has certain quirks, and he should be careful of his tendency toward a pulp-fiction style. Characters ''grit,'' or ''effuse'' or ''grate.'' And always they ''grunt.'' On many pages there are several grunts apiece. There also are cliches all over the place: ''The willowy slenderness of her body'' and things like that. ''The Child and the Serpent'' is not even near this literary level. [Sy Cook] pays an acknowledgment to Carol Sturm Smith, ''who undertook the writing of this book as a collaborative effort.'' Between the two they have turned out a novel about Nazi experiments on the human psyche and a Polish boy who has developed lethal psychic powers. The Nazis have fled to South America and are still experimenting. ''The Child and the Serpent'' has the makings of a good book - but as it stands, it is weakened by stereotyped characters, poor organization and flat prose.

HARRY C. STONER, 81, MoHo Drive, Orlando, died Tuesday, Feb. 8. Mr. Stoner was a printer.

Financial skullduggery is, of course, very much part of the news of the day, and we're constantly being afflicted by tales of insider trading and missing millions. Mary Logue's heroine, Laura Malloy, is involved in another current concern in Still Explosion (Seal Press, 234 pages, $18.95, cloth). It all begins when she is asked by her employer the Twin City Times to write a piece about abortion. She visits an abortion clinic and is there as a young man carrying a bomb blows himself up when apparently about to visit his girlfriend. Laura is very much shaken, physically as well as emotionally, by this event, and sets about exploring the whole abortion issue in the city. In so doing she discovers that private motives lie behind public attitudes and that obsession and evil may walk hand in hand. The story is a good one, though some improbabilities jar a little. Laura Malloy, however, is as sensible, courageous and compassionate as ever and the social scenes she encounters are observed with splendid acuity and a certain sardonic humor. This is a book worth tackling and it contrives, remarkable enough, to avoid didactic moralizing.

In speaking to [Kirsty]'s roommate, [Harry Stoner] finds out that Kirsty and her brother, Ethan, still are feeling the aftereffects of their mother's mysterious death 11 years previously. The siblings apparently think they know who killed her and now are looking for revenge. Stoner hopes to find them before something tragic can happen, but doesn't make it. The man they suspected of killing their mother is found dead, and both Kirsty and Ethan still are missing and now presumed dead. Although Stoner's client succumbs to a heart attack, Stoner feels compelled to continue working on the case, to find out what has really happened - both in the present and the past.