By Paul Carrier
Elizabeth Morse is a wealthy entrepreneur who is snatching up huge chunks of land in Down East Maine as part of her campaign to create a national park. By posting her land, she has further antagonized the locals, who resent the loss of hunting grounds and the threatened elimination of wood-products jobs if the park becomes a reality. For Morse, death threats have become a fact of life.
Part of Morse’s estate is within the territory of Mike Bowditch, a Maine game warden who has been transferred to coastal Washington County -- a Warden Service Siberia of sorts -- because he’s not too good at taking orders and he keeps sticking his nose into murder investigations that are the purview of the state police. The fact that he’s a good detective only seems to make things worse.
“For three years, my fellow wardens had been taking bets on my own longevity in the service,” Bowditch says. “In the minds of my superiors, Warden Mike Bowditch was the human equivalent of a grenade with a pulled pin. How, they wondered, can anyone behave so self-destructively without ever actually destructing?”
Bowditch is keeping a low profile at the start of this fourth mystery starring the black sheep of the Warden Service. Then he gets a call from Billy Cronk, a onetime poacher and hunting guide who now works for Morse. Someone has been shooting moose on Morse’s gated property, but not for trophies or meat because the moose have been left to die. All told, 10 moose have been gunned down on the estate, making it the largest wildlife crime in Maine’s history.
Lt. Marc Rivard, Bowditch’s boss, pulls out all the stops to solve the case, calling in wardens from throughout his district. But Bowditch, who was the first warden on the scene and the one who reported the shootings, finds himself marginalized by Rivard, who doesn’t like him. Rivard probably hopes to goad Bowditch into disobeying orders by giving him lousy assignments only loosely related to the investigation.
As Bowditch tries to cope with his job-related woes, as well as burdensome personal problems, tensions mount. A speeding driver tails Morse’s terrified daughter Briar one night on a darkened local road. The windows of Morse’s lakeside mansion are shot up by a boater. Then a murder that may well be linked to the earlier crimes gives the already prominent case an even higher profile.
Bowditch meets, or reconnects with, plenty of intriguing characters in Massacre Pond. Aging hippie Leaf Woodwind, a Morse retainer, may or may not be Briar’s father. Bowditch finds himself falling for Stacey Stevens, a lovely green-eyed pilot and state biologist, even though she’s engaged to a lumber baron’s son. Sgt. Kathy Frost of the Warden Service, Bowditch’s former boss and one of his few real friends, turns up to provide support when Bowditch needs it most.
This wouldn’t be a Paul Doiron novel if it didn’t also feature an assortment of offbeat, often disreputable, locals, any one of whom might have had a hand in the killings. As Bowditch, who narrates the novel, tells readers: “Anyone who thinks that country people are the salt of the earth needs to go on patrol with a game warden.”
Wilbur Williams, aka Karl Keith Khristian, is a crazed, gun-toting “sovereign citizen,” a “bald gnome of a man with sun-damaged skin and a permanent squint that suggested irritable bowel syndrome or an undiagnosed need for reading glasses.” Chubby LeClair, an ersatz Passamaquoddy Indian, weighs close to 300 pounds and has a mug “like a ball of bread dough before it has been rolled flat.” Todd Pelkey and Lewis Beam are accomplished hunters who share their backwoods trailer, and their beds, with the same woman. And then there’s Bowditch’s friend Cronk, a blond-haired, bearded giant with “arms that could have snapped a two-by-four over his knee for kindling.”
Doiron tells a satisfying tale that builds on the earlier novels in the series as Bowditch matures and questions the wisdom of his decision to become a game warden. A thrill ride of a plot and a believable cast of characters are the most obvious attractions of Massacre Pond. Equally compelling, in a more subtle way, is the success with which Doiron conveys an evocative sense of place. His Maine is the real deal.
Although Doiron’s protagonist may have doubts about his chosen career, Mike Bowditch is a thoughtful man with a poet’s soul who deeply loves the Maine woods. In one memorable scene, Bowditch and his pal, a retired game warden, are momentarily surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bats at dusk.
“The fear left me, replaced by an upwelling sense of wonder in my chest,” Bowditch says. “I had an impulse to spread out my arms, wishing the bats might somehow lift me up and carry me off to some secret place only they knew about.”
