By Paul Carrier
Mike Bowditch is roaming the wilds of Maine once again in this sixth installment of Paul Doiron’s highly regarded mystery series, which pits the young but resourceful game warden against the most dangerous wildlife to be found in the Pine Tree State: the two-legged variety.
Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery, young women hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, disappear in Maine’s Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the most remote section of the trail. Bowditch finds himself involved in a massive search that leads him to a lean-to where the women signed the register before moving on.
There’s no evidence that the missing hikers turned up anywhere farther north along the trail, so Bowditch seems to have discovered what search-and-rescue crews in the novel refer to as the PLS: point last seen. As the search intensifies without results, the powerful, well-connected parents of the women fly to Maine in a private Learjet, placing added pressure on the already stressed and overworked investigators.
Bowditch began this series as a green maverick who kept getting into trouble with his superiors by sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. He’s more mature and cautious in this outing, but a bit of the old Bowditch bubbles to the surface after his mentor and fellow free spirit, retired Warden Service pilot Charlie Stevens, turns up with his plane to help out.
The stakes rise higher still when searchers find two corpses that have been picked clean by coyotes. Are they the bodies of the missing hikers? Were they killed by wild animals? Or does a murderer remain at large? Bowditch’s personal and professional lives suddenly intersect when Stacey Stevens, the pilot's daughter and Bowditch's new love interest, disappears after the coyote-ravaged bodies are discovered.
Doiron knows a thing or two about the politics, culture and history of his home state of Maine, which is the setting for all of the Bowditch novels. Most importantly, he captures the state’s untamed beauty and brings to life the wildness of what is often called “the real Maine,” with its breathtaking vistas and down-on-their-luck backwoods denizens.
The Bowditch novels transport readers far beyond the lights of Portland and the shopping emporiums of Kittery and Freeport. A Colby College grad blessed with a keen eye and a thoughtful outlook, Bowditch offers a wry take on the people who inhabit the state he calls home. The locals will recognize their state here, and outsiders will learn a fair bit about Maine ways.
In explaining the widespread popularity of country music in Maine, for example, Bowditch muses that rural Mainers are “just hillbillies with a different accent." An early morning stop at a small-town store finds the not-unusual sight of a "prematurely old-looking man" buying a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon to start off his day. As any Mainer knows, and as Bowditch explains in The Precipice, "it is considered a politeness to wave at drivers going in the opposite direction" in the Maine woods, even if they are strangers.
Doiron is a former editor of Down East magazine and a Registered Maine Guide. His descriptions of Maine, including the search for the missing hikers, are tellingly observed and sure-footed. In an author’s note, Doiron thanks a corporal in the Maine Warden Service for providing him with “crucial information about the service’s search-and-rescue operations.”
Bowditch once again finds himself surrounded by a colorful cast of recurring characters. Stacey Stevens is “Maine’s most kick-ass wildlife biologist." Warden Service chaplain Deb Davies — a Methodist minister with a back-to-the-land farm and a yellow VW Beetle — is back in The Precipice. So’s Kathy Frost, Bowditch’s seasoned and sarcastic former sergeant, who’s recovering from a shooting that left her in a coma in a previous novel. Bowditch may no longer be struggling to learn the ropes in her shadow, but Frost still addresses him as "grasshopper."
There are plenty of newcomers here as well, including a clan of rustic bad boys straight out of Deliverance and Maine’s unnamed but “hot-tempered" governor, which would appear to be a thinly veiled reference to Paul LePage, the state’s real-life, pugnacious chief executive.
In keeping with the best traditions of crime writing, potential suspects abound in The Precipice, to keep readers guessing until the end. There are the coyotes, of course, as well as a pudgy hiker with a checkered past, a mystery man in a red tent, and an antisocial AT veteran known as Nonstop Nissen, because of his record-setting pace on the trail. Who (or what) holds the key to the hikers' fate? And to Stacey Stevens' disappearance late in the game?
