By Paul Carrier
If Mike Bowditch led a simple, predictable, well-ordered life, he might be a happier man, plagued by fewer demons and less angst. But then we would have no interest in reading about him.
A Maine game warden and the protagonist in Paul Doiron’s mystery series, Bowditch has matured since we first met him. In this seventh entry, he's a bit older, somewhat wiser and (so it seems) less impulsive. He’s settling into a stable relationship with Stacey Stevens, a wiildlife biologist and the daughter of a close friend. And he appears to be coming to terms with the psychological trauma inflicted by his late father, a drunken, abusive ne’er-do-well.
But Bowditch still has a knack for finding trouble. In the past, that has prompted him to launch unauthorized investigations that are beyond the scope of his job. In Widowmaker, he continues to follow his instincts, ultimately placing his life in jeopardy.
This time out, the young Colby College grad, who’s been on the job for several years now, is contacted by a middle-aged woman who wants him to find her missing son Adam. Amber Langstrom claims she had an affair with Bowditch’s late father, Jack. Adam, she says, is Jack's son, so Bowditch would seem to have a half brother who has vanished. He's also a half brother with a troubled history.
It turns out Adam was convicted of statutory rape because he had consensual sex with his underage girlfriend after he turned 18. Once he was released from prison, he found his way to a controversial logging camp in the Maine woods that his probation officer describes as a refuge of last resort for registered sex offenders who can’t find work anywhere else. Eventually, Adam got his hands on a pickup and took off, to points unknown.
Thanks to that possible genetic link, Bowditch’s curiosity gets the best of him and he sets out to find Adam. In the process, he meets a group of vigilantes who disdain sex offenders, as well as various rustic oddballs who would not make the best next-door neighbors. Then there's Shadow, a wolf-dog hybrid who urinates in Bowditch's truck and figures prominently in the novel’s denouement.
Bowditch’s search seems to be going nowhere when an empty, blood-soaked pickup registered to Amber turns up outside an isolated, well-guarded military installation. Was Adam murdered? By whom, and why? Where’s his body? Answers remain elusive until a subsequent murder spree lifts the veil.
Like its predecessors in the series, Widowmaker is peppered with Maine lore, quirks and geography, conveying a real sense of place that will be revealing to the uninitiated, but familiar to those of us who live here.
Readers learn — or are reminded, if they already have a working knowledge of Maine — that folks in the state’s more remote stretches derisively refer to the wealthier, more populous southern part of the state as northern Massachusetts.
When Bowditch, who narrates the novel, encounters a drug-addled lowlife with an offbeat fashion sense, he muses that “everything came to my rural state long after it was passé elsewhere,” and Goth — one such late arrival — “lost something in the translation” when it finally hit Maine.
Later, Bowditch works in a pithy explanation of Maine’s vast unorganized territories, where there are no incorporated municipalities and the few residents rely on the state for essential services. “Most of the North Woods consisted of remote plantations and townships whose residents were effectively serfs under the rule of distant czars,” Bowditch explains with a dash of editorial spin.
Doiron is adept at crafting vivid dialogue for nuanced, believable characters, and his novels are so well-plotted that it’s hard to put any of them down unfinished. A Maine native who once edited Down East magazine, he’s a skilled storyteller who is intimately familiar with his home turf. It shows.
