Cold Front
Game Warden Mike Bowditch investigates a brutal murder and a family's devastating secrets in the latest twisty thriller from Edgar Award-nominated author Paul Doiron.
When family friend Miriam Peters asks Bowditch to help find her missing husband, he expects to locate a wayward forager in the Maine woods. Instead he finds a body: Bogdan Peters, execution-style bullet through the forehead, bound to a tree deep inside Acadia National Park.
Bogdan was a gentle man by all accounts―a devoted husband, a new father, a maker of beautiful instruments. But the deeper Bowditch digs, the more he discovers a life shaped by secrets: a fractured family, a father who defected from the Soviet Union with powerful Russian enemies still hungry for revenge, and a Cold War mystery that someone has been willing to kill for.
Soon Bowditch finds himself dodging the FBI, who want him off the case, and a dangerous stranger newly arrived from overseas who is running his own investigation. When Bowditch's wife and young son are threatened, what began as a favor for a friend becomes a race to uncover the truth before it buries him.
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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 sixteen 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.
