By Paul Carrier
Paul Doiron has been busy since The Poacher’s Son, his debut novel in the Mike Bowditch series, hit shelves back in 2010. In addition to a few short stories, Doiron has released nine more novels featuring Bowditch, a Maine game warden, including the just-issued Almost Midnight.
But Doiron has not sacrificed quality in the interest of productivity. Almost Midnight is up to his usual standards, a taut and gripping mystery set in Maine, as are all of the earlier novels in the series.
This time out, Bowditch’s friend, Billy Cronk, who’s serving time for murder, asks Bowditch to look into the background of Dawn Richie, a female prison guard, but Cronk refuses to say why. A short time later, two inmates attack Richie and another guard in the prison’s laundry room, killing the male guard and wounding Richie with improvised knives. She only escapes with her life because Cronk, who happens to be on hand, kills one of the attackers and wounds the other, sustaining injuries of his own in the process.
Why did one of the attackers tell Richie that she deserved to die because she was a rat? And why did Cronk change his tune about Richie after the attacks, speaking of her in positive terms rather than with suspicion?
Later still, another prison guard dies at home in a supposed mishap, along with his sister and their mother. By then, Cronk has fled the minimum-security prison to which he was transferred after the governor promised to pardon him for saving Richie. (Doiron's bombastic governor bears some resemblance to former Maine Gov. Paul LePage.) As the state police search for Cronk, he emerges as a suspect in the mysterious triple deaths, which may well have been acts of murder designed to look like an accident.
A separate, but equally compelling, plotline finds Bowditch searching for the culprit who shot Shadow, a wolf-dog hybrid that escaped from Bowditch’s care years earlier and has been living in the wild ever since. Taken to an animal hospital in western Maine by a fellow game warden, Shadow undergoes surgery, but seems unlikely to survive.
Technically, Bowditch isn’t a traditional game warden in Almost Midnight, having been promoted to the job of investigator (translation: detective) within the Maine Warden Service. While Bowditch is a fictional character, the Warden Service is quite real, a fully empowered police agency whose statewide turf is more woodsy than urban.
Doiron describes this setting in convincing detail, occasionally dropping in a fictitious town or two among references to actual Maine communities, real geographic features, and recognizable landmarks. Despite a wealth of historical facts, cultural allusions and natural-history lessons, the novel’s pace never slackens.
The state of Maine “is definitely a character,” in the Bowditch novels, Doiron told Yankee magazine in a 2017 interview. Maine is “a different character in every book,” Doiron said. “I try to move Mike Bowditch around from place to place . . . .”
Bowditch was a newbie game warden when the series began, knowledgeable and competent but troubled and impulsive. He remains a bachelor in Almost Midnight, but he has changed over the years, personally and professionally, as he is reassigned from region to region and migrates from one romantic entanglement to another.
Doiron told Yankee that readers would not want to read about Bowditch in book after book, “unless I focus on his growth as a person, and get people to feel like they’re on his side and can see his maturing process.” The author continues to achieve that goal while telling fast-paced tales of a Maine that is not the stereotypical stuff of postcards.
If you’re looking for a top-notch mystery series set in the Pine Tree State, written by an author who knows the place well and conveys that fact on every page, Doiron’s Mike Bowditch novels fit the bill nicely. A Maine native and Yale graduate, Doiron is a Registered Maine Guide and a former editor of Down East, which bills itself as the magazine of Maine.
But Doiron has not sacrificed quality in the interest of productivity. Almost Midnight is up to his usual standards, a taut and gripping mystery set in Maine, as are all of the earlier novels in the series.
This time out, Bowditch’s friend, Billy Cronk, who’s serving time for murder, asks Bowditch to look into the background of Dawn Richie, a female prison guard, but Cronk refuses to say why. A short time later, two inmates attack Richie and another guard in the prison’s laundry room, killing the male guard and wounding Richie with improvised knives. She only escapes with her life because Cronk, who happens to be on hand, kills one of the attackers and wounds the other, sustaining injuries of his own in the process.
Why did one of the attackers tell Richie that she deserved to die because she was a rat? And why did Cronk change his tune about Richie after the attacks, speaking of her in positive terms rather than with suspicion?
Later still, another prison guard dies at home in a supposed mishap, along with his sister and their mother. By then, Cronk has fled the minimum-security prison to which he was transferred after the governor promised to pardon him for saving Richie. (Doiron's bombastic governor bears some resemblance to former Maine Gov. Paul LePage.) As the state police search for Cronk, he emerges as a suspect in the mysterious triple deaths, which may well have been acts of murder designed to look like an accident.
A separate, but equally compelling, plotline finds Bowditch searching for the culprit who shot Shadow, a wolf-dog hybrid that escaped from Bowditch’s care years earlier and has been living in the wild ever since. Taken to an animal hospital in western Maine by a fellow game warden, Shadow undergoes surgery, but seems unlikely to survive.
Technically, Bowditch isn’t a traditional game warden in Almost Midnight, having been promoted to the job of investigator (translation: detective) within the Maine Warden Service. While Bowditch is a fictional character, the Warden Service is quite real, a fully empowered police agency whose statewide turf is more woodsy than urban.
Doiron describes this setting in convincing detail, occasionally dropping in a fictitious town or two among references to actual Maine communities, real geographic features, and recognizable landmarks. Despite a wealth of historical facts, cultural allusions and natural-history lessons, the novel’s pace never slackens.
The state of Maine “is definitely a character,” in the Bowditch novels, Doiron told Yankee magazine in a 2017 interview. Maine is “a different character in every book,” Doiron said. “I try to move Mike Bowditch around from place to place . . . .”
Bowditch was a newbie game warden when the series began, knowledgeable and competent but troubled and impulsive. He remains a bachelor in Almost Midnight, but he has changed over the years, personally and professionally, as he is reassigned from region to region and migrates from one romantic entanglement to another.
Doiron told Yankee that readers would not want to read about Bowditch in book after book, “unless I focus on his growth as a person, and get people to feel like they’re on his side and can see his maturing process.” The author continues to achieve that goal while telling fast-paced tales of a Maine that is not the stereotypical stuff of postcards.
If you’re looking for a top-notch mystery series set in the Pine Tree State, written by an author who knows the place well and conveys that fact on every page, Doiron’s Mike Bowditch novels fit the bill nicely. A Maine native and Yale graduate, Doiron is a Registered Maine Guide and a former editor of Down East, which bills itself as the magazine of Maine.
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