“Snakebit” is a satisfying amuse bouche from Paul Doiron, a vignette from warden Mike Bowditch’s past that doesn’t follow the events of Hatchet Island, published in June 2022. Dead Man’s Wake, the 14th in the series, drops June 27th. “Snakebit” shows us Bowditch as a junior game warden. His personality, his relationship with his co-workers,…
1 It’s a wonder that all marriages don’t end in murder-suicides,” said my stepfather’s new wife, Jubilee. Neil, my stepdad, nearly spit out his decaf. It was the evening of Stacey’s and my engagement party. In the five years since my mom had died, Neil Turner and I had drifted apart. We had never been…
Chapter 1 The woman on the phone refused to give her name, but she swore she’d just seen a rattlesnake on her hike up Black Cat Mountain. “I almost stepped on the frigging thing!” The man on the other end of the call was a Maine game warden named Mike Bowditch. “Did you get a…
Readers have grown up with Maine game warden investigator Mike Bowditch, a seasoned warden with a preternatural talent for doggedly ferreting out the truth. It’s a trait that has made him enemies in and out of law enforcement. Mike and his longtime off-and-on girlfriend Stacey Stevens are back together; she’s his soul-mate but they’ve had…
PROLOGUE Every night, no matter how many drinks he’d had or joints he’d smoked, he would awaken to the screams of birds. For an instant, he would think he was back on the island. Then his hand would find the lamp beside the bed and the light would expose the messiness of his dorm room.…
1 It had snowed the night before, just a trace, but now the sky was a deep blue, and a faint breeze was blowing powder off the boughs of the pines. Spellbound by the glitter in the air, I slowed my patrol truck and thought how it might have seemed to someone more innocent than…
Road trip! Man and wolf are off to visit the vet and afterward, conduct a cold-case inquiry. Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s cold-case is “the suspicious drowning of a wealthy professor.” The death was deemed accidental, but the professor’s persistent and unconventional daughter-in-law is sure he was murdered. After speaking with her, Mike interviews “a…
Priced at just $1.99, this original short story in the bestselling Mike Bowditch mystery series by Paul Doiron finds Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch on the hunt for a sinister prowler turning a couple’s dream vacation home into a nightmare. New owners of a dream cottage on a remote Maine lake find themselves taunted, then…
Chapter 1 The hill is steep here, and there is no guardrail above the river. I think I am being careful, keeping a light touch on the wheel, feathering the brakes. But then I come around the curve and see the spiked objects scattered across the asphalt in my headlights. They look like barbaric…
Mike is off his game from the get-go in One Last Lie, thanks to Charley Stevens. Before I left for Florida, my old friend and mentor Charley Stevens gave me a puzzling piece of advice. “Never trust a man without secrets.” I thought he’d misspoken. “Don’t you mean a man with secrets?” But…
