Trespasser
If you read The Poacher’s Son by Paul Doiron, there’s a good chance you’ll buy Trespasser by the same author. It was released this past summer as the sequel that picks up Maine game warden, Mike Bowditch’s calamitous life and career where Poacher left off.
This time, it’s a simple roadkill that lays the groundwork for Bowditch’s convoluted path to apprehending a copycat killer, the least suspected of all the suspicious candidates.
Both the driver of the car that hit a deer on Parker Point Road and the deer are missing when Mike arrives on the scene. He was already a little put out to be called away from an investigation into some ATV vandals to cover a mere roadkill. Besides, he’d fallen face first in the mud; he was cold and wet, and he was a mess.
The scene awaiting him was textbook and typical. There was the blood from the deer pooled on the frozen road, there was the battered car with no driver. The usual explanation: The deer had already been picked up by someone who monitors a police scanner, and the driver, who had probably been drinking, walked on to his or her destination rather than risk an OUI. But somehow, the pat answers weren’t resonating here.
Bowditch doesn’t want to be there in the first place. You can tell he’s torn between the pressure of his work––the landowner who’d complained about the ATV’ers––and that of his girlfriend Sarah, recently moved back in with him and looking for a “normal” relationship. It was, for most people, “after hours” anyway, and he didn’t need the aggravation, not tonight.
Even so, something is wrong. It’s March after all, the off-season, cold and unkind to midnight walkers on Maine’s midcoast. When he talks to Seal Cove dispatch, he learns that the passerby who phoned in the incident had actually spoken with the driver––a young girl named Ashley Kim. So where is she? When a wise-mouthed state trooper arrives late at the scene to take over, Bowditch is content to make his exit, but what he’d seen bore a mark of foul play.
As the story unfolds, we’re happy to see old Charley Stevens and his wheelchair-bound wife, Ora once again. Charley is Mike’s retired warden pilot friend and mentor who seems happy to remain engaged with warden work through his young protege. Maybe it takes his mind off being bullied by the new landowner that demands an inflated price for the property his camp/home sits on. It was Charley who helped unravel the murder Mike’s father was accused of in Poacher, and now it’s Charley who accompanies him on a hunch that leads to Ashley Kim’s body.
From here, it’s a long way to the killer, but you never yawn. As with any big event in any small Maine town, almost everyone is affected. The fact that the murder mimicked one from years earlier, a controversial case that factionalized the town muddies the water even more in this soggy, mud season saga set in Seal Cove, Maine.
Trespasser may be fiction, but it would ring true to any reader who even casually picks up a Bangor Daily News, or tunes in WABI, or hangs out at Helen’s in Machias or Moody’s in Waldoboro. Every event, every description, every quote, right down to the quips and banter of folks in the local diner all correlate to Maine.
Trespasser captures and holds a pitch of suspense without ever being cute or quaint. Like Poacher, it reveals a coarse underbelly within the rural beat of a district warden like Mike Bowditch. He loves his work, but hates much of what he sees. He wrestles constantly with the “end-justifies-the means” logic that sometimes tempts law enforcement to operate outside the law.
Trespasser also takes up the testiness between locals and tourists in destination towns like Seal Cove. Hardscrabble histories die hard, living on in locals who still regard rural Maine as a lawless frontier where they ought to be free to live as they please with only a little help from public assistance checks. If Doiron didn’t spin his crime fictions amid this context, they’d be far less believable.
For those readers who miss the Stoney Calhoun sequels penned by the late William G. Tapply, rejoice in Paul Doiron who picks up the torch with Trespasser, even as he touches up the third Mike Bowditch installment.
Trespasser by Paul Doiron; hardcover; 310 pages, $24.99 Minotaur (2011)
Randy Spencer is the author of “Where Cool Waters Flow: Four Seasons With a Master Maine Guide,” the New England Outdoor Writers Association 2010 Book of the Year. Visit www.randyspencer.com