Review: "Stay Hidden," Paul Doiron

By Paul Carrier

Mike Bowditch, a 29-year-old Maine game warden, is moving up in the world. After spending several years enforcing hunting and fishing laws in various parts of the state, Bowditch’s penchant for solving crimes has finally impressed his superiors enough to get him promoted to warden investigator, a fancy synonym for detective.

That should leave Bowditch quite pleased with himself in Stay Hidden, Paul Doiron’s ninth Bowditch mystery, which follows last year’s Knife Creek. But when Bowditch, fellow warden Ronette Landry and a state police detective travel to an island 20 miles off the Maine coast to investigate the death of a woman who appears to have been accidentally shot by a hunter, what looked like an open-and-shut case turns out to be anything but.

The hunter who is believed to have killed Ariel Evans, a famed investigative reporter who wrote an exposé of a neo-Nazi group, turns out to be innocent. The island’s secretive lobstermen aren’t at all keen on helping the investigator nab the killer. And Bowditch finds himself in a turf fight with detective Steve Klesko of the state police.

All that would be bad enough, but another complication develops the day after the neophyte investigator arrives on Maquoit Island. A woman walks off the ferry insisting she is Ariel Evans, the shooting victim. With Klesko and Landry now back on the mainland tackling other duties and the Warden Service spread too thin to send help, Bowditch is on his own as fog settles over the remote island, with its hostile denizens and a killer still at large.

Is Bowditch up to the task at hand? The answer seems far from certain. He loses his cell phone. He discovers that the locals are either avoiding him or providing evasive answers to his questions. And when he learns that the unusual circumstances surrounding the death are making headlines on the mainland, his boss warns him to start finding answers pronto or risk being scapegoated for the state’s lack of progress in the case.

If the killing was murder rather than a hunting accident, potential suspects abound. The dead woman had been having an affair with a married lobsterman named Nat Pillsbury, whose wife may have known about it. The island’s residents include two brothers who are white supremacists. And Maquoit’s combination school teacher / librarian had been seeing Pillsbury before he dumped her for the victim, who also had some sort of relationship with Blake Markman, a hermit living on an islet just off the coast of Maquoit.

Throughout this series, Doiron has consistently combined well-developed characters and razor-sharp dialogue with believable, action-packed plots, and Stay Hidden is no exception. As a Maine native and former editor in chief of Down East, which bills itself as the magazine of Maine, Doiron knows his turf, and uses that knowledge to convey a strong sense of place. Stay Hidden is peppered with geographical tidbits, snippets of island lingo, a dash of lobstering terminology and passing references to Moxie and Allen’s Coffee Brandy, two staples of Maine lore.

“There are fifteen islands off the coast of Maine that are populated year-round,” Bowditch, as the novel’s narrator, tells us early on. “On one end of the spectrum are the floating suburbs of Casco Bay,” from which residents commute to nearby Portland. “On the other end is the lonely outpost of Matinicus, which is so far from land that the ferry makes only a single trip a month in the winter.”

As a novelist, Doiron does take permissible liberties, one of which involves Maquoit Island itself. There’s a Maquoit Bay in Maine and a ferry called the Maquoit II and a Maquoit Drive in the town of Freeport, but there is no island by that name.

Which probably is just as well. If Doiron had set his tale on an actual Maine island, the real-life residents would be none too pleased with his depiction of them as clannish misfits stuck on a claustrophobic hunk of rock, nursing ancient feuds that result in sunken lobster boats and retaliatory shootings.

A big part of Bowditch’s appeal as a character is that he’s been a renegade since he first turned up in Doiron’s 2010 debut, The Poacher’s Son. He has matured considerably since then, but not to the point of becoming a by-the-book cop. (In Maine, game wardens are trained and armed police officers, the only real difference between them and other cops being the location and nature of their beat.)

Bowditch may have tamed his independent streak, but fortunately he hasn’t fully conquered it. As he prepares to fly back to the mainland after  a series of adventures and misadventures, his boss summons him to a meeting in his office. "We have a lot to discuss about the quality of your decision-making over the past few days," the captain warns, as well as problems with "procedure and communication." All of which is a good thing. Mike Bowditch wouldn’t be Mike Bowditch if he worried about dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.