The Poacher's Son
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father, Jack, a hard-drinking womanizer who makes his living poaching illegal game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before—and his father is their prime suspect. Jack has escaped from police custody, and only Mike believes that his tormented father might not be guilty.
Now, alienated from the woman he loves, shunned by colleagues who have no sympathy for the suspected cop killer, Mike must come to terms with his haunted past. He knows firsthand Jack’s brutality, but is the man capable of murder? Desperate and alone, Mike strikes up an uneasy alliance with a retired warden pilot, and together the two men journey deep into the Maine wilderness in search of a runaway fugitive. There they meet a beautiful woman who claims to be Jack’s mistress but who seems to be guarding a more dangerous secret. The only way for Mike to save his father now is to find the real killer—which could mean putting everyone he loves in the line of fire.
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Paul Doiron
In the shadowed woods of Maine, where the silence is broken only by the crack of branches and the distant call of a loon, Paul Doiron found the pulse of his fiction. His novels don’t just flirt with danger—they move through it deliberately, guided by the steady instincts of a man who knows the land as intimately as he knows the people who live on its edges.
Doiron is the author behind the critically acclaimed Mike Bowditch crime series, which has quietly become a mainstay for readers who crave mystery grounded in reality. His protagonist, a game warden with a haunted past and a dogged moral compass, investigates crimes not from behind a desk, but on foot, in forests where cell service fades and the terrain offers no second chances. This immersive backdrop—the Maine wilderness—is not a setting in Doiron’s books. It’s the soul of them.
Mike Bowditch
In the dense, whispering woods of Maine, justice isn’t handed down in courtrooms—it’s hunted, tracked, and sometimes lost to the wild. That’s the world readers step into with the Mike Bowditch series, a brooding, atmospheric journey through crimes that are as tangled and unforgiving as the forests they’re born in.
Mike Bowditch consists of fifteen primary books, and includes eight additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
