Review: "Storm Tide," Paul Doiron

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

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 appearance of rattlesnakes 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.