By Paul Carrier
Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch is a good guy, but a bit of a rogue. His disgruntled superiors don't have grounds to fire him, and he refuses to quit. So the powers that be have found another way to punish their young warden for his perceived misdeeds.
Bowditch, who had been working along Maine's Midcoast, is reassigned to Washington County, Down East. The rural, sparsely populated region is known as the Bold Coast, because of its rugged shoreline, and the Sunrise County, because it's the easternmost point in the United States. It's also poverty-stricken and drug-infested, a hardscrabble land of marginalized people who, as Bowditch's former sergeant puts it, "eat wardens for lunch."
Some of the locals -- the folks most likely to violate the hunting and fishing laws that game wardens are sworn to uphold -- quickly become dissatisfied with Bowditch once he arrives on the scene in Bad Little Falls, the third novel in Paul Doiron's fine series starring the conscientious but independent-minded warden.
After Bowditch nabs a hunting guide for allowing a "sport" to fire a gun on posted land near a home, he finds a coyote pelt nailed to the door of his rented trailer, either as a prank or a warning. Alone and lonely, he has no family or friends close at hand. His former girlfriend is gone, having moved to Washington, D.C. And his new boss in the Warden Service, Sgt. Marc Rivard, doesn't like him. At all.
Rivard's attitude is understandable, given Bowditch's reputation. Bowditch tells readers he's known within the Warden Service as "impulsive, hotheaded, too impressed with my own intelligence, book-smart rather than woods-smart, a discipline problem, not a team player."
Soon enough, Bowditch has more important things to worry about. While trying to make his way home one night during a horrendous winter storm, he's called to a house where a half-frozen man has turned up. The human icicle is John Sewall, aka Prester, a drunk and a ne'er-do-well who is known to hang out with drug dealer Randall Cates. Prester claims he left someone behind in their snowed-in car, so Bowditch heads out on a borrowed snowmobile to conduct a search.
Bowditch finds the 2004 Grand Am, but there's no one inside. The trunk contains thousands of dollars in cash, presumably from a drug sale, as well as a shotgun and a Glock. When Rivard and another warden arrive with a search dog, they locate Cates nearby. He's dead, and the medical examiner's preliminary conclusion is that someone suffocated him by holding his head in the snow.
Prester, by now a murder suspect, ends up in the local hospital, where Bowditch runs into a distraught Jamie Sewall, who is Prester's sister and Cates' former girlfriend. Her son Lucas, a scrawny and troubled loner who's constantly jotting things down in a journal, quickly realizes that Bowditch is attracted to his mom. Despite the fact that Prester is now under investigation for a crime in which Bowditch is a material witness, Bowditch becomes involved with Jamie and fails to disclose the relationship, which gets him into hot water with investigators once they find out what he's been up to.
In typical fashion, Bowditch's get-to-the-bottom-of-things doggedness kicks in, and he soon finds himself investigating Cates' death, even though it's outside his jurisdiction as a game warden. "If you want to play detective," Rivard warns him, to no avail, "you should join the state police."
Bowditch may be the protagonist here, but his employer -- the Maine Warden Service -- is a compelling character in its own right. In Maine, game wardens enforce fish and game laws, as well as ATV, snowmobile and boating laws. They also investigate hunting-related shooting accidents and conduct search and rescue operations. In an author's note, Doiron explains that no other law-enforcement agency in Maine has suffered more deaths in the line of duty than the Warden Service.
A Maine native, Doiron has a feel for his turf, and the skill to portray it. He describes scattered houses on one stretch of road as "a mix of rusty trailers, farmhouses with advanced cases of osteoporosis, and newer modular homes that looked like they had come out of the same cereal box. The residents tended to hang their laundry even in the dead of winter: faded bedsheets, spit-stained onesies, stretch pants, and a surprising amount of thong underwear."
Doiron offers up carefully nuanced, entirely believable characters in a rousing yarn whose many twists build to a heart-stopping chase on a frozen pond, making it hard to put this one down. New Englanders in general, and Mainers in particular, will enjoy Bad Little Falls all the more because of its setting, but the appeal of this complex, atmospheric mystery knows no regional boundaries.
Bowditch, who had been working along Maine's Midcoast, is reassigned to Washington County, Down East. The rural, sparsely populated region is known as the Bold Coast, because of its rugged shoreline, and the Sunrise County, because it's the easternmost point in the United States. It's also poverty-stricken and drug-infested, a hardscrabble land of marginalized people who, as Bowditch's former sergeant puts it, "eat wardens for lunch."
Some of the locals -- the folks most likely to violate the hunting and fishing laws that game wardens are sworn to uphold -- quickly become dissatisfied with Bowditch once he arrives on the scene in Bad Little Falls, the third novel in Paul Doiron's fine series starring the conscientious but independent-minded warden.
After Bowditch nabs a hunting guide for allowing a "sport" to fire a gun on posted land near a home, he finds a coyote pelt nailed to the door of his rented trailer, either as a prank or a warning. Alone and lonely, he has no family or friends close at hand. His former girlfriend is gone, having moved to Washington, D.C. And his new boss in the Warden Service, Sgt. Marc Rivard, doesn't like him. At all.
Rivard's attitude is understandable, given Bowditch's reputation. Bowditch tells readers he's known within the Warden Service as "impulsive, hotheaded, too impressed with my own intelligence, book-smart rather than woods-smart, a discipline problem, not a team player."
Soon enough, Bowditch has more important things to worry about. While trying to make his way home one night during a horrendous winter storm, he's called to a house where a half-frozen man has turned up. The human icicle is John Sewall, aka Prester, a drunk and a ne'er-do-well who is known to hang out with drug dealer Randall Cates. Prester claims he left someone behind in their snowed-in car, so Bowditch heads out on a borrowed snowmobile to conduct a search.
Bowditch finds the 2004 Grand Am, but there's no one inside. The trunk contains thousands of dollars in cash, presumably from a drug sale, as well as a shotgun and a Glock. When Rivard and another warden arrive with a search dog, they locate Cates nearby. He's dead, and the medical examiner's preliminary conclusion is that someone suffocated him by holding his head in the snow.
Prester, by now a murder suspect, ends up in the local hospital, where Bowditch runs into a distraught Jamie Sewall, who is Prester's sister and Cates' former girlfriend. Her son Lucas, a scrawny and troubled loner who's constantly jotting things down in a journal, quickly realizes that Bowditch is attracted to his mom. Despite the fact that Prester is now under investigation for a crime in which Bowditch is a material witness, Bowditch becomes involved with Jamie and fails to disclose the relationship, which gets him into hot water with investigators once they find out what he's been up to.
In typical fashion, Bowditch's get-to-the-bottom-of-things doggedness kicks in, and he soon finds himself investigating Cates' death, even though it's outside his jurisdiction as a game warden. "If you want to play detective," Rivard warns him, to no avail, "you should join the state police."
Bowditch may be the protagonist here, but his employer -- the Maine Warden Service -- is a compelling character in its own right. In Maine, game wardens enforce fish and game laws, as well as ATV, snowmobile and boating laws. They also investigate hunting-related shooting accidents and conduct search and rescue operations. In an author's note, Doiron explains that no other law-enforcement agency in Maine has suffered more deaths in the line of duty than the Warden Service.
A Maine native, Doiron has a feel for his turf, and the skill to portray it. He describes scattered houses on one stretch of road as "a mix of rusty trailers, farmhouses with advanced cases of osteoporosis, and newer modular homes that looked like they had come out of the same cereal box. The residents tended to hang their laundry even in the dead of winter: faded bedsheets, spit-stained onesies, stretch pants, and a surprising amount of thong underwear."
Doiron offers up carefully nuanced, entirely believable characters in a rousing yarn whose many twists build to a heart-stopping chase on a frozen pond, making it hard to put this one down. New Englanders in general, and Mainers in particular, will enjoy Bad Little Falls all the more because of its setting, but the appeal of this complex, atmospheric mystery knows no regional boundaries.
