Almost Midnight
While on vacation, Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch receives a strange summons from Billy Cronk, one of his oldest friends and a man he had to reluctantly put behind bars for murder. Billy wants him to investigate a new female prison guard with a mysterious past, and Mike feels honor-bound to help his friend. But when the guard becomes the victim in a brutal attack at the prison, he realizes there may be a darker cover-up at play—and that Billy and his family might be at risk.
Then Mike receives a second call for help, this time from a distant mountain valley where Shadow, a wolf-hybrid he once cared for, has been found shot by an arrow and clinging to life. He searches for the identity of the bowman, but his investigation is blocked at every turn by the increasingly hostile community. And when Billy’s wife and children are threatened, Mike finds himself tested like never before. How can he possibly keep the family safe when he has enemies of his own on his trail?
Torn between loyalties, Mike Bowditch must respond in the only way he knows how: by bending every law and breaking every rule to keep his loved ones safe and the true predators at bay.
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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.
