Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Review: "The Bone Orchard," Paul Doiron

Mystery review of The Bone Orchard by Paul Doiron

By Paul Carrier

Mike Bowditch was far from self-satisfied in Paul Doiron’s first four mysteries. But at least the cocksure young Maine game warden with a penchant for ignoring orders and sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong had a steady job and a life that, while troubled, was somewhat stable.

In The Bone Orchard, his world is turned upside down. And he’s adrift.

Bowditch has resigned from the Warden Service, where the brass is glad to be rid of him. "In the time I had been a game warden," he says, "I had been investigated or disciplined for numerous infractions," and the commanding colonel had called him "an embarrassment to the service." Bowditch concedes he had been "hard-pressed to disagree."

Now Bowditch is trying to make ends meet as an underpaid hunting and fishing guide. Cancer has claimed his mother’s life. The woman of his dreams shows no interest in him. And Sgt. Kathy Frost, his friend and mentor, has been critically wounded by an unknown shooter. The attack occurred shortly after Frost killed Jimmy Gammon, a badly disfigured and disillusioned young veteran, in what appears to have been a case of suicide by cop. 

A heavy load to bear. And it gets worse.

It was Bowditch who found Frost only minutes after she was shot. He was injured in an exchange of gunfire with the would-be killer, who got away. Now investigators are wondering if one of Gammon’s buddies in the National Guard, or some other vengeful veteran, shot Frost in retaliation for Gammon’s death.

Before she was attacked, Frost told Bowditch that Gammon would still be alive if Bowditch had stayed on as a warden. Frost had been trying to get Bowditch reassigned to her district when he upped and left. Had she succeeded, Frost might have been working with Bowditch, rather than a rookie warden, the night she responded to a call from Gammon’s mother that her son was drunk and holed up in a barn with a gun.

Bowditch and Gammon were friends before Gammon went to Afghanistan, after which the two men lost touch. So Bowditch is hit doubly hard by the turn of events, both because he might have prevented Gammon's death had he been at the scene and because of the subsequent shooting of his trusted ally Frost, who is so badly wounded that she slips into a coma at the hospital.

Worried. Heartsick. Guilt-ridden. That’s Mike Bowditch as he once again inserts himself into a police investigation without invitation, this time to find whoever tried to kill Frost. The  vengeance-for-Gammon theory is plausible, but Bowditch wonders if the shooting was unrelated to Gammon’s death. Could someone else who had an ax to grind with Frost have timed the attack to throw suspicion on other members of Gammon’s National Guard unit?

As Bowditch digs deeper into the case, secrets emerge. Bowditch finds Frost’s alcoholic and unstable brother living at her house after the shooting, only to see him steal Frost’s SUV and disappear. Could he have been the shooter’s intended target? A mysterious newspaper clipping about an old woman’s accidental death turns up in Frost’s home, along with an odd and indecipherable, but perhaps meaningful, drawing.

As he did in his previous novels in this series, author Paul Doiron has cooked up a satisfying stew whose ingredients include vivid characters, a fascinating setting and a well-plotted mystery.

Even the secondary characters are finely drawn, and one of them —Deb Davies, the Warden Service’s chaplain — offers a dash of comic relief. Davies drives a lemon yellow Vokswagen Beetle with a cutting from a lilac bush inserted into a vase in the dashboard. When Bowditch needs a gun but doesn’t have one on him, she lends him her Smith & Wesson .38 Special, complete with pink handle.

Doiron is a Maine native, and he describes his state well. "Maine combines aspects of all the New England states," Bowditch tells readers, with affluent suburbs such as those in Connecticut, sandy beaches that are "dead ringers for the Rhode Island seashore," scenic villages "right out of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of western Massachusetts," open fields reminiscent of Vermont dairy farms and the glorious beauty of Mount Katahdin, "as snowy as the White Mountains of New Hampshire."

Readers devoted to this series may find themselves wondering if Bowditch is Doiron’s alter ego. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Doiron was asked what he has in common with his likable but unpredictable protagonist. "We share a love of the outdoors and maybe a tendency toward arrogance,” Doiron said. “We’re both reckless and headstrong. But he’s braver than I am, and I think he has a kinder heart than I do."