Review: "Dead Man's Wake," Paul Doiron

By Paul Carrier

Paul Doiron, author of the Mike Bowditch mystery series, wastes no time getting down to business in the 14th novel featuring Bowditch, a headstrong Maine game warden who, in his younger days, made a name for himself by bending the rules and sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.

A mere five pages into Dead Man’s Wake, which is set on a lake in Belgrade, Maine, Bowditch and his fiancé, Stacey Stevens, hear a nighttime collision on Great Pond (as the lake is called).

Only a few pages later, a man’s severed arm is found in Great Pond. That is followed, in short order, by the discovery of two bodies in the lake. One is the now one-armed Kip Whitcomb, a married man from Massachusetts. The other is Gina Randazza, a young Maine woman who was Whitcomb’s mistress. Both are quite dead.

It turns out Whitcomb’s body was mangled by a motorboat’s propeller. But was he still alive when the boat struck him, or already dead? As for Randazza, her body is intact when Warden Service divers haul it up from the lake’s bottom. She had been strangled, but is that what killed her, or was there some other cause?

Maine game wardens are armed and fully empowered police officers who serve as woods and waters cops and coordinate search and rescue operations in remote areas. So while the State Police launch a murder investigation, Bowditch tackles the job of finding the hit-and-run boater who plowed into Whitcomb. As is often the case in Doiron’s novels, Bowditch once again finds himself in a close but uneasy partnership with the State Police.

Now in his 30s, Bowditch is more cool-headed than he was as a rookie. In fact, he has been promoted to warden investigator (aka, detective). But old impressions die hard. ‘My reputation had a bad habit of preceding me,” says Bowditch, who narrates the novel. Not surprisingly, members of the Major Crimes Unit of the State Police “saw me as someone unable or unwilling to stick to my lane.”

Doiron always serves up memorable characters and fast-paced plots, leaving the reader itching to learn what happens next. Dead Man’s Wake is no exception. The Bowditch series also provides travelogues of sorts, thanks to Doiron’s penchant for setting each novel in a different part of Maine. In this case, we find ourselves in an area north of the state capital of Augusta, known locally as the Belgrade Lakes Region. 

I thought I had solved the mystery of the two deaths three-quarters of the way through the novel, which left me disappointed in Doiron. Fortunately, I was dead wrong. Doiron knew exactly what he was doing all along. Another murder and some 40 pages later, he finally was good and ready to reveal all. It was worth the wait.