Massacre Pond
On an unseasonably hot October morning, game warden Mike Bowditch is called to the scene of a bizarre crime in eastern Maine: the corpses of ten moose have been found senselessly butchered on the estate of Elizabeth Morse, a wealthy animal rights activist who is buying up huge parcels of timberland to create a new national park.
What at first seems like mindless slaughter—retribution by locals for the job losses Morse's plan is already causing in the region—becomes far more sinister when a shocking murder is discovered and Mike's investigation becomes a hunt to find a ruthless killer. In order to solve the controversial case, Bowditch risks losing everything he holds dear: his best friends, his career as a laws enforcement officer, and the love of his life.
The beauty and magnificence of the Maine woods is the setting for a story of suspense and violence when one powerful woman’s missionary zeal comes face to face with ruthless cruelty.
Readers also enjoyed
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.
