By Paul Carrier
Mike Bowditch, a rookie, trouble-prone Maine game warden, has a knack for landing himself in hot water. He ran afoul of his fellow cops in Paul Doiron’s The Poacher’s Son. And he goes rogue yet again in Trespasser, a sequel in which Bowditch oversteps his authority by investigating yet another murder -- or two.
In Doiron’s Edgar Award-nominated debut, Bowditch set out to clear his estranged father when he emerged as the prime suspect in a double homicide. This time around, Ashley Kim, a college professor's research assistant, disappears after her car strikes a deer on a coastal road in Maine. Bowditch and his wise but impish mentor, retired Warden Charley Stevens, find Kim’s mutilated body in the palatial summer home of Hans Westergaard, the Harvard Business School prof for whom Kim worked.
Suspicion quickly turns to Westergaard, who has disappeared. But his wife Jill fears her husband is himself a victim of foul play. She categorically rejects the theory that Westergaard had an affair with Kim, killed her, and fled. Maybe she’s just in denial. Or maybe she’s on to something.
Potential suspects abound. In addition to the missing Westergaard, there’s Dave and Donnie Drisko, father-and-son rednecks who snatched the dead deer from the accident scene. Did they kidnap Kim too? The mystery caller who notified police of the car/deer collision remains unidentified. And a local caretaker has keys to the Westergaard mansion.
Once word of the murder starts making the rounds in Knox County, however, the locals are abuzz about another aspect of the case. Kim’s murder bears striking similarities to the killing several years earlier of waitress Nikki Donnatelli, for which lobsterman Erland Jefferts has been convicted and imprisoned. Is the latest murder the work of a copycat? Or did the state prosecute the wrong guy in the Donnatelli case? Has her killer struck again?
Doiron is a Maine native and a former magazine editor in Maine. He knows his home state, and it shows. This is not the air-brushed Maine to be found in glossy magazines and tourism brochures, but the multifaceted state that residents know and love. The real Maine, warts and all, provides a compelling backdrop for this well-crafted mystery.
Readers see the dismissive, all-too-familiar way in which a haughty Massachusetts resident refers to small-town Mainers as “a bunch of bumpkins.” Resentful Mainers return the favor, deriding tourists and summer people from the Bay State as “Massholes.” Pricey estates and rundown mobile homes where a cockroach could “live like a king” share the landscape.
Bowditch values his state’s stunning beauty and rugged wilderness, but the dogged, anger-prone warden recognizes that Maine is “desperately poor,” with its share of lowlifes and ne’er-do-wells holed up in shacks and trailers along secluded dirt roads. Kathy Frost, Bowditch’s blunt Warden Service sergeant, calls the state “the fist of Appalachia shoved up the ass of Maritime Canada.”
Even the Donnatelli murder has its roots in reality. In an author’s note, Doiron says he was inspired by the high-profile case of Dennis Dechaine, a farmer from Bowdoinham, Maine, who was convicted in 1989 of raping and murdering a 12-year-old babysitter. Dechaine’s vocal supporters have argued for years that he is innocent. In the novel, allies rally to Jefferts’ defense and seize on Kim’s murder as proof that Donnatelli’s killer is still at large.
Doiron made a clever — and, for the reader, rewarding — move by making Bowditch a game warden rather than a sheriff’s deputy, city policeman or state trooper. The fact that his beat is the Maine woods makes him a more intriguing protagonist than he would be as a stock cop.
It also gives Doiron a chance to explore the little understood and often underappreciated world of the Maine Warden Service. In an especially memorable scene, Bowditch borrows his sergeant’s high-powered ATV to chase a suspected vandal through the woods as a March ice storm blows in. It’s an edge-of-your-seat passage.
“Being a game warden is an old-fashioned job,” Bowditch says. “As professions go, it seems to belong to some lost and legendary age, right along with blacksmithing, lamplighting, and the harpooning of sperm whales. The Sheriff of Nottingham is history’s most famous game warden. What does that tell you?”
In Doiron’s Edgar Award-nominated debut, Bowditch set out to clear his estranged father when he emerged as the prime suspect in a double homicide. This time around, Ashley Kim, a college professor's research assistant, disappears after her car strikes a deer on a coastal road in Maine. Bowditch and his wise but impish mentor, retired Warden Charley Stevens, find Kim’s mutilated body in the palatial summer home of Hans Westergaard, the Harvard Business School prof for whom Kim worked.
Suspicion quickly turns to Westergaard, who has disappeared. But his wife Jill fears her husband is himself a victim of foul play. She categorically rejects the theory that Westergaard had an affair with Kim, killed her, and fled. Maybe she’s just in denial. Or maybe she’s on to something.
Potential suspects abound. In addition to the missing Westergaard, there’s Dave and Donnie Drisko, father-and-son rednecks who snatched the dead deer from the accident scene. Did they kidnap Kim too? The mystery caller who notified police of the car/deer collision remains unidentified. And a local caretaker has keys to the Westergaard mansion.
Once word of the murder starts making the rounds in Knox County, however, the locals are abuzz about another aspect of the case. Kim’s murder bears striking similarities to the killing several years earlier of waitress Nikki Donnatelli, for which lobsterman Erland Jefferts has been convicted and imprisoned. Is the latest murder the work of a copycat? Or did the state prosecute the wrong guy in the Donnatelli case? Has her killer struck again?
Doiron is a Maine native and a former magazine editor in Maine. He knows his home state, and it shows. This is not the air-brushed Maine to be found in glossy magazines and tourism brochures, but the multifaceted state that residents know and love. The real Maine, warts and all, provides a compelling backdrop for this well-crafted mystery.
Readers see the dismissive, all-too-familiar way in which a haughty Massachusetts resident refers to small-town Mainers as “a bunch of bumpkins.” Resentful Mainers return the favor, deriding tourists and summer people from the Bay State as “Massholes.” Pricey estates and rundown mobile homes where a cockroach could “live like a king” share the landscape.
Bowditch values his state’s stunning beauty and rugged wilderness, but the dogged, anger-prone warden recognizes that Maine is “desperately poor,” with its share of lowlifes and ne’er-do-wells holed up in shacks and trailers along secluded dirt roads. Kathy Frost, Bowditch’s blunt Warden Service sergeant, calls the state “the fist of Appalachia shoved up the ass of Maritime Canada.”
Even the Donnatelli murder has its roots in reality. In an author’s note, Doiron says he was inspired by the high-profile case of Dennis Dechaine, a farmer from Bowdoinham, Maine, who was convicted in 1989 of raping and murdering a 12-year-old babysitter. Dechaine’s vocal supporters have argued for years that he is innocent. In the novel, allies rally to Jefferts’ defense and seize on Kim’s murder as proof that Donnatelli’s killer is still at large.
Doiron made a clever — and, for the reader, rewarding — move by making Bowditch a game warden rather than a sheriff’s deputy, city policeman or state trooper. The fact that his beat is the Maine woods makes him a more intriguing protagonist than he would be as a stock cop.
It also gives Doiron a chance to explore the little understood and often underappreciated world of the Maine Warden Service. In an especially memorable scene, Bowditch borrows his sergeant’s high-powered ATV to chase a suspected vandal through the woods as a March ice storm blows in. It’s an edge-of-your-seat passage.
“Being a game warden is an old-fashioned job,” Bowditch says. “As professions go, it seems to belong to some lost and legendary age, right along with blacksmithing, lamplighting, and the harpooning of sperm whales. The Sheriff of Nottingham is history’s most famous game warden. What does that tell you?”
