Review: "Storm Tide," Paul Doiron

By Paul Carrier

 

Mike Bowditch, a Maine game warden, was a man on the rise in previous novels by Paul Doiron.

After starting out in the Warden Service as a callow, reckless guy with a knack for breaking the rules, Bowditch matured enough to win a promotion to inspector, the Warden Service term for a detective.

But then his better angels abandoned him when he chased a suspect into Canada without authorization from his superiors or the Canadian government. That got him demoted. To make matters worse, a review board later decided to place him on paid leave for several months, because of his infractions.

So Bowditch is not, at least for the time being, a working warden when Storm Tide, the latest novel in the Bowditch series, kicks into high gear. But he still has a lot on his plate.

Bowditch being Bowditch, getting sidelined doesn’t stop him from investigating a suspicious and catastrophic fire that kills a husband and his wife. The widely reviled husband, Brian Malloy, had been accused of abducting and murdering a son he had with another woman.

Heading into rural Washington Couny, Maine, with his pregnant wife Stacey so she can be with her parents for a home birth, Bowditch quickly gets drawn into a second case, this one involving a man who dies when a train runs over him. The train’s crew could not see the victim until it was too late, and there’s reason to believe someone deliberately placed the man on the rails.

Were all three deaths — at the house and on the tracks — linked vigilante killings? How did the killers (or killer?) decide whom to target? Will the culprits/culprit be identified and apprehended before the death toll rises?

In the midst of all this mayhem, Bowditch gets unsettling texts and phone calls from a man who refuses to identify himself but seems to know Bowditch. A mysterious white van keeps turning up in Bowditch’s orbit. So does a dangerous-looking hulk who seems to be up to no good.

Bowditch’s life really takes a turn for the worse when he is abducted by a crazed scallop diver. The kidnapper, who may be conspiring with the mystery caller/texter, imprisons Bowditch aboard a boat and tries to drown him. (It's a close call, but Bowditch survives.)

And that’s just for starters.

The propulsive plot races along at a breakneck pace as Bowditch’s seemingly endless adventures/misadventures continue apace. Doiron has a knack for pulling readers along at warp speed, and Storm Tide is no exception.

Fortunately, there are occasional breathers. The birth of the Bowditchs' son, for one. And the always appreciated wit and wisdom of Stacey’s parents, especially her father, Charley Stevens, a retired Warden Service pilot whose statewide connections allow him to gather intel and pull strings for his son-in-law from time to time.

Then there’s the potentially risky but entertaining relationship between Bowditch and Shadow, a wolf dog he adopted quite a while back. Bowditch allows Shadow to sleep in the house before his son is born. Despite his wolfish ways, Shadow is very protective of Stacey during her pregnancy.

The wolf-dog hybrid even travels with Bowditch on occasion. “I climbed behind the wheel while Shadow stuck his big head through the space between the front seats,” Bowditch says at one point. “He lapped my unshaven check with his obscenely long tongue. His breath was rank. I pushed his muzzle away only to have him thrust it back at me, undeterred.”

A Maine native, Doiron is a registered Maine guide who knows his way around the Pine Tree State, including its wilder corners (human and  otherwise). But here's a piece of advice. Once you crack open Storm Tide, get ready to set your other priorities aside for a while. You’ll be far too busy flipping pages. 

Review: "Storm Tide," Paul Doiron

By Liz Soares

When NetGalley sends me an invitation to download the upcoming Mike Bowditch novel, I do not hesitate to say yes. And then start reading. Immediately.

The Maine game warden is back on patrol duty after his shenanigans in Canada in Pitch Dark. Will he ever return to investigator status? The question hovers over Mike for the entire book.

It depends on whether he can keep his nose clean, and fans of the series know that though Mike has grown more mature over the years, sticking to the straight and narrow is impossible for him.

This is true even though he’s stationed close to home in the Belfast-Camden area. Wife Stacey is expecting. Billy Cronk and family live nearby. Wolf dog Shadow prowls his outdoor refuge. If only Mike could be content with living a quiet life.

Nope. He responds to a fire at a McMansion. A neighbor, Karen Kershaw, stands outside the burning building, holding a baby. Mike tries to save the father, but fails. He’s devastated, but then learns the man was implicated in a child’s disappearance and likely death.

Mike wants to investigate the fire, even though it’s a state police matter. But when he tries to question the neighbor, she disappears. Meanwhile, he starts getting ominous messages from somebody who knows a lot about him. In fact, the stalker seems to have interacted with Mike when he covered the Machias area, a decade or more ago.

Mike is determined to find out what’s happening in both situations. Are they connected? He’s not exactly reckless, but he does take chances, and gets himself (and Billy) in trouble (to put it mildly) more than once.

But has he ever faced three villains before? One is an evil genius, the worst kind of bad guy. Then there’s the huge, dim-witted but single-minded thug. The third thinks he has a moral agenda, and that includes killing Mike if necessary.

And what about the mysterious neighbor, Karen Kershaw? How does she fit into all this?

Whew. Luckily for my blood pressure, the story is stretched out over nearly a year. The brief interludes of calm (a visit to Charley and Ora Stevens’ homestead always soothes me) don’t thwart the pacing of the book. It’s a page-turner, with the hair-raising scenes nicely (thankfully) complemented by the characters beloved by readers and the richly evoked Maine setting.

Take the scene where Mike is in the headquarters of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, just across the Kennebec River from where I write. He gazes out a window and sees a sturgeon leap out of the water.

After everything Mike endures in these pages, a flash of the unexpected and beautiful feels exactly right. It’s the kind of detail that stays with you long after you turn the final page.

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Storm Tide will be released on June 30, 2026

Review: "Skin and Bones," Paul Doiron

By Liz Soares

Charley Stevens as a young Maine game warden, tracking down a mysterious hermit. His wife, Ora, driving to a remote homestead to help a woman in peril. Shadow, the wolf-hybrid, helping out on a case. And Warden Mike Bowditch investigating the bizarre appearnce of a rattlesnake in Maine--as described by a third-person narrator.

Skin and Bones, an absorbing collection of short stories by Paul Doiron (and the title of one of those stories), is a kind of through-the-looking glass trip. It has the comfortable familiarity of the novels in Doiron's popular mystery series featuring Bowditch, but it’s served up with a twist.

The tales add the backstories of characters readers have come to know, and fills in some spaces between the novels. The final story, Sheep’s Clothing, picks up where 2024’s Pitch Dark left off. It doesn’t significantly advance Bowditch’s life except in one important way, which I won’t reveal here.

Several of the stories feature Charley, Bowditch’s crusty, fearless mentor—in his salad days. His daughter Stacy, who eventually marries the younger warden, is a kid. Charley’s wife, Ora, has yet to be seriously injured in a plane accident. In Skin and Bones, Charley is approached by Mike’s father, Jack, who was a poacher and all around bad ‘un. In this story, however, Jack has found a dead bald eagle, is outraged, and wants Charley’s help in finding who killed it.

Bowditch is the protagonist in other stories, at various stages in his career. He’s working in the Sebago Lake region when he gets a report there’s a rattlesnake on the loose. As every Mainer knows, there are no deadly snakes in Maine…but then a young man is attacked by a rattler and may lose a leg. When Mike gets to the scene, he meets up with a memorable character from one of the novels (Knife Creek?)— Ricky Elwell, the young diamonds-in-the rough taxidermist and butcher who, it turns out, knows a lot about snakes. Though the novels are told by Bowditch, this story is told by a third-person narrator, which provides an interesting perspective on the sometimes reckless warden.

All the stories have the same strong sense of place as the novels; Doiron is adept at painting the varied landscape  of Maine. There are general stores, rough shacks at the end of dirt roads, rich people from away, snowmobiles, lakes and mountains. Doiron’s use of real locations—Grand Lake Stream, Lake St. George—always adds richness to his fiction.

I thoroughly enjoyed what felt like an inside look at some of my favorite characters in mystery fiction. And though I live right here in Maine, it really is a great place to visit. Despite all the murders.

Skin and Bones will be published in May; I read an advance copy through the NetGalley program.

Review: "Pitch Dark," Paul Doiron

 

By Paul Carrier

Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch has had more than his share of scrapes since 2010, when author Paul Doiron introduced him in The Poacher’s Son, the first book in the Bowditch mystery series.

Young, inexperienced and cocky, Bowditch routinely found himself at odds with assorted bad apples in the novels that followed, not to mention his periodic run-ins with his superiors for breaking the rules, exceeding his authority and generally behaving like an all-knowing  pain in the ass.

Over the course of 14 novels, Bowditch matured, learned the ropes, developed at least a modicum of restraint and even got himself married to the daughter of his mentor, retired Warden Service pilot Charley Stevens. But he’s still a bit cocky. His father-in-law likes to warn him to practice humility, “just for the novelty” of it.

In Pitch Dark, the 15th book in the series, Bowditch gets dragged into a case involving an Idaho man who is offering locals $100 for information on the whereabouts of a reclusive builder and his young daughter. Hammond Pratt, the man looking for the duo, disappears after renting an ATV. Has he gone underground? Is he stranded somewhere in the rain-soaked woods? Injured, perhaps, or even dead?

The man who is being pursued, Mark Redmond, is building a backwoods cabin for a friend of Bowditch’s father-in-law. Redmond lives in seclusion with his daughter Cady, whom he always prevents from going into town with him. The new cabin’s owner, a bush pilot, agrees to fly Bowditch and Charley Stevens to the construction site to interview Redmond.

At this point it’s still unclear who the culprit is here. Is it the guy doing the pursuing or the man being pursued? Or someone else entirely? That becomes a bit clearer in short order when a murder occurs. But not too clear. Doiron is too skilled a writer to reveal too much too soon.

Stevens stays put at the construction site, but Bowditch quickly finds himself entangled in a desperate bid to apprehend a killer and save a young girl.

The search takes him on a nighttime trek through the heavy woods of Somerset County, Maine, along the Québec border, where the body count grows. The armed warden must contemplate crossing into Canada without authorization in what probably would be a career-busting move that could also lead to his prosecution in Canada for illegal entry while armed.

Doiron has previously proven himself to be a master of pacing and suspense, and Pitch Dark proves that he certainly hasn’t lost his touch. I found myself racing through the novel, desperate to learn what would happen next as the twists and turns kept on coming.

Each of Doiron's novels is set in a different part of Maine, which makes them all the more enjoyable for Mainers but satisfying as well for people “from away,” as Mainers call folks who are, well, from away. A Maine native, Doiron is a Registered Maine Guide and a former editor of Down East magazine, so he knows the territory.

And Doiron has had access to high-powered professional advice as well. In his acknowledgments, he thanks the head of the state agency that includes the Warden Service for her help, as well as the colonel who oversees the Warden Service and a wildlife biologist, among other experts.

The novels can be read out of order, but an extensive backstory has developed over the years involving Bowditch’s upbringing, his relationship with Charley Stevens, his progress as a warden, and his romantic entanglements before he finally settles down with Stacey Stevens. For that reason, it’s best to read the books chronologically, starting with The Poacher’s Son. You may get through all 15 novels with surprising speed.

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.

Review: "Hatchet Island," Paul Doiron

 

By Paul Carrier

Prolific author Paul Doiron, former editor in chief of Down East magazine and a registered Maine guide, is back with the 13th entry in his mystery series featuring intrepid, risk-taking Maine game warden Mike Bowditch.

Elevated to the rank of investigator within the Warden Service, Bowditch and his girlfriend, Stacey Stevens, find themselves flitting from island to island off the coast of Maine in search of the killer (or killers) who murdered two researchers at a seabird sanctuary and injured a third.

The case, of course, is under the primary jurisdiction of the Maine State Police. But Bowditch has a knack for weaseling his way into high-profile criminal investigations that, time after time, benefit from his involvement.

Hatchet Island, a taut, fast-paced novel with an intriguing setting and memorable characters, is no exception. But be forewarned. Hatchet and its neighboring islands offer anything but a tourist's dream of an idyllic summer getaway.

Review: "Dead by Dawn," Paul Doiron

 

By Paul Carrier

Mike Bowditch, the protagonist in Paul Doiron’s Maine-based mysteries, has encountered his share of bad guys in the eleven novels that preceded Dead by Dawn, the latest in the series. But this time out, he has to grapple with some of the most deranged psychos ever to cross his path.

A game warden who works as a detective for the Maine Warden Service, Bowditch finds himself reopening the four-year-old case of an elderly man who is believed to have drowned in a hunting accident, amid allegations that the victim, Eben Chamberlain, was murdered.

Dead by Dawn is the very definition of a page-turner, thanks to a high level of suspense, a likable main character readers are sure to root for and the novel’s vivid portrayal of the state that Bowditch—and Doiron—call home.

Review: "One Last Lie," Paul Doiron

By Paul Carrier

Mike Bowditch returns in One Last Lie, the 11th entry in Paul Doiron’s mystery series starring a fictional investigator (i.e., detective) in the quite real Maine Warden Service, a police agency that enforces fish and wildlife laws and coordinates search-and-rescue operations.

Bowditch, who has a penchant for breaking the rules and overstepping his bounds, has traveled across Maine in the previous novels.

This time out, we find him in "The County," a vast swath of land along the Canadian border that is larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. Heading north in search of his missing mentor, Bowditch gets drawn into two murder cases — one old and another all-too-new.

Review: "Almost Midnight," Paul Doiron

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.

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.

Review: "Knife Creek," Paul Doiron

By Paul Carrier

Life can flip from the absurd to the horrific in no time flat, as Mike Bowditch, a Maine game warden, learns when he almost literally trips over an unbelievable discovery while on a mundane assignment in Knife Creek.

On duty in western Maine, Bowditch has been charged with tracking and shooting a newly arrived herd of feral hogs that are damaging the environment and may be diseased. He and his girlfriend, state wildlife biologist Stacey Stevens, kill two sows and a boar, only to discover that the presumed delicacy one of the sows was consuming right before her death is the corpse of an infant.

Analysis by state forensic experts reveals that the baby, a girl, was not stillborn, and that she was about two weeks old at the time of her death. Who left her in a shallow grave near a hiking path --  and why -- remain mysteries.

While the state police grapple with the few clues they have, Bowditch, who has a habit of playing detective without authorization, discovers that the child may have been the daughter of Casey Donaldson, a college student who disappeared during a canoeing trip on the Saco River.

Bowditch is convinced he spotted Donaldson at a backwoods home while conducting his unofficial inquiries. The young woman appears to be drugged, disoriented and fearful. Donaldson, if that’s who she is, is living with an older woman who claims to be her sister and is verbally abusive toward her.

But far from explaining the infant’s fate, that raises new questions. Bowditch and Stacey found the newborn’s body shortly after it was left in the woods. Yet Donaldson has been missing for four years, and is presumed dead. So either she isn’t the baby’s mother or she’s still very much alive, and possibly being held captive.

Acting on Bowditch’s tip, a state trooper is set to question both women, with Bowditch in tow, when a propane explosion blows their rented home to smithereens. The house seems to have been empty at the time, so the working theory is that Donaldson and her presumed kidnapper fled the scene after Bowditch’s first visit and deliberately destroyed the house to get rid of any evidence about Donaldson’s whereabouts and identity.

Knife Creek is the eighth Mike Bowditch mystery. No longer the callow renegade he was in the early going, Bowditch still has an independent streak, and he doesn’t like sitting on the sidelines while other investigators — in this case, the state police — try to freeze him out. But he’s almost 30 now, so he’s less impulsive than he used to be, and more of a team player. To a degree.
 
Bowditch’s personal travails figure in the plot as well, providing added depth to what fans of the series already know about this likable character. For one thing, Bowditch is seeking a promotion that he may have trouble getting because of his reputation in the Warden Service as something of a loose cannon. And Stevens, his girlfriend, is talking about leaving Maine, which could spell the end of their otherwise stable relationship because Bowditch has no desire to live elsewhere.

A Maine native, Doiron is a Registered Maine Guide and a former editor of Down East magazine, so he knows the lay of the land in the largest state in New England and conveys it well, both in terms of Maine’s natural environment and its social fabric.

Like the other novels in the series, Knife Creek combines believable characters, a compelling setting and a driving story line, making it hard to put this thriller down once you’re a few pages into it. You don’t have to be a Mainer — or even a visiting tourist — to enjoy Doiron’s latest suspenseful read, which follows 2016’s Widowmaker. If you're a fan of fast-paced, well-crafted mysteries, that's qualification enough.

Review: "Widowmaker," Paul Doiron

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.