Dead by Dawn by Paul Doiron
Paul Doiron was a reporter for the Portland Press Herald. (I used to deliver their Sunday edition when I lived in Bangor before he was born.) He knows Maine and he incorporates that knowledge into his eleven novels featuring Mike Bowditch, a game warden who has a talent for solving complex mysteries involving death. Mike usually has to free-lance quite a bit to catch the bad guy/gal, so he routinely irritates his bosses and as punishment gets transferred to the middle of nowhere which in much of Maine is everywhere.
The book starts with Mike’s Jeep running over tire-destroying spikes that were set in the road as he is descending a steep hill in the middle of winter in northern Maine. The car goes off the road, lands in a pond, and begins to sink. He has his pet wolf/dog, Shadow, with him in a cage in the back, and he needs to save himself and the canine before sinking into oblivion or dying of hypothermia. The narrative alternates by chapter between his efforts to get to dry land and survive the night and the investigation he did that led to the spikes in the road.
Early in the book we learn that he and Shadow did get out of the water, but surviving a night in winter in Maine without specialized clothing or equipment is a challenge. Doiron incorporates a lot of how-to-survive-a-freezing-winter-night-in-Maine information into the book which is really interesting. What saves Mike in the end is his knowledge of how to use everything around him to keep going until he finds the next thing he needs to survive.
And the author is good at describing what’s going on:“My bobbing skull strikes the ice again, bounces off, rises one last time. And somehow my face has found its way above the surface. I choke out river water, take the biggest breath I have ever taken, and look up at snowflakes blowing like feathers across the sky.”
On the day that ended up with Mike in the water at night, game warden Bowditch had visited an old friend. Billy Cronk had seen horrendous action in Iraq and, after he returned home, had gone to prison for not being able to control his violent tendencies – no doubt triggered by PTSD from his time in combat. With Billy out of prison now, Mike is visiting the Cronk family on December 21, the winter solstice. Billy has kids and a great wife who stood by him while he was incarcerated. Mike is almost family, and the young Cronk daughter admonishes him for not having done anything to decorate his house for Christmas.
Nature and weather are central characters in these books. One Maine maxim frequently cited by Warden Bowditch is that, “There’s no bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” As it turns out in this novel, what Mile was wearing as he tumbled into the water after his jeep crashed was suitable for the task of keeping him alive. He is wearing Gore-Tex and a goose down coat and that made all the difference.
Wild animals are also important elements in these books. One of a game warden’s main responsibilities is to keep humans from wiping out critters. Warden Mike has essentially adopted a wolf-dog crossbreed, Shadow. They have an interesting relationship.Mile has set up a wolf-friendly space in his backyard but Shadow’s not sure he likes it. There is a constant tension between the two of them, which Bob in the Basement, although not an English major, recognizes the tension as a metaphor for the relationship of humans to animals in the wild.
Mike has other relationships, besides Shadow. Bowditch went out with one woman, Stacey, for three years. She’s the daughter of one of his best friends, a retired warden who is also a pilot. As the book opens, Stacey had left him and moved away to find some space. The other woman who may or may not be in his life is Dani, a Maine state trooper. He and Dani are sort of an item, and she is about to take a new job with the Portland Police Department.
The center of the story is the investigation into the demise of a professor, Eben Chamberlain, who died while duck hunting. His wife does not believe that it was an accident and wants Mike to check it out. He has no jurisdiction and it looks like an accident, but he does go to talk to her about the death.
The next chapter recounts Mike’s finding his wolf dog, Shadow, who had survived the river plunge. Mike also found an abandoned fishing shack near the river that provided some shelter. Mike manages to lose his pistol, but the shack offers some hope, a rare commodity on a cold winter’s night in upstate Maine.
Mike’s former boss, Mark, a jerk who is no longer in public service, argues that the dead professor just died in a river accident when he fell into the rushing water. Mike thinks that he’s probably right, but, since Mark’s a jerk, maybe Mike should do some digging.
Meanwhile, back at the fishing shack, while Mike lost his weapon, he still has bullets which he uses them to light a fire with goose down from a vest he found in the shack. I am not making this up. Any Maine game warden knows that goose down is very flammable, and a bit of a spark from gunpowder will ignite it. He finds some wood and gets a fire going.
Moving back to the investigation of Eben’s death narrative, Mike interviews the deceased’s grand-daughter, Bibi, who is in full Goth make-up. As it turns out, Bibi is a gun expert and she and Mike have an interesting discussion. Mike talks to Eben’s wife, Mariette, an upper-class woman who is convinced that her husband was murdered. She tells Mike that Eben was an expert fisherman and always had his life preserver on while fishing. It wasn’t on his body when it was found. The mystery deepens. As Mike is leaving, Bibi tells him that the deceased Eben, and a local luminary, Bruce Jewett, were closet lovers. Mariette agrees and believes that Bruce killed her husband. The mystery deepens further.
Back at the shack, Mike and Shadow sit by the fire as Mike worries that Shadow will go all-wolf and attack him. Shadow, like Mike, is happy to be warm so all is well. Doiron sets out a nice description of the fire:
“Softwood hisses as steam escapes from the burning gas. The flames change color, depending on what has ignited. Orange for pine and birch bark, yellow for maple branch, blue for cellophane, monofilament fishing line, and assorted trash gathered from the floor.”
The author can write.
Mike also has figured out that Bruce Jewett is very involved in what happened to Eben Chamberlain, and that Bruce is the person who set up the tire spikes that flipped Mike’s Jeep into the pond. Mike is worried that Bruce is hanging around and can see the fire in the fishing shack, which makes it easy for Bruce to finish the job of eliminating Mike from the scene.
Mike had interviewed Bruce earlier and got nowhere. Bruce is very smooth and can talk his way out of anything, Bruce’s mother has Alzheimer’s Disease, which adds an element of surrealism to the conversations between Brice and Mike.
Meanwhile back at the shack as Mike was leaving it, he was shot by someone. He has a serious leg wound to go along with being out in the cold. Mike gives us a quick lesson in gunshot first aid in this chapter, and he eventually fashions a tourniquet to keep him from bleeding out. Mike is hurt but he knows he has to move to stay alive.<br>
Mike’s interview with Bruce included a shooting contest. Bruce likes to show off his rifle skills. Bruce is a better shot than Mike, but during the contest Mike probes a bit and confirms that Bruce and Eben were lovers, despite Bruce’s denunciation of such.
Mike goes back to interview Bibi again. He learns that Eben loaned Bruce a lot of money that was never paid back. Bibi also tells Mike about a strange group that lives in a compound – known locally as Pill Hill because of drug activity – and is really anti-social. Arlo Burch, a leader of the gang, was one of the last people to see Eben on the water. Arlo welcomes Mike into his mobile home and introduces him to two young twins that are his girlfriends. Arlo is a bartender who has a lot of nice stuff, so Mike assumes that he is a drug dealer, a fairly common profession in rural Maine. The place is bizarre, with plush rugs and terrariums full of exotic snakes. Tori and Tiff Dillon, the twins, hate cops and they are really rude to Mike. Arlo doesn’t know much about what happened to Eben when he died, but Tori tells Mike to talk to their grandmother, Grambo, who may know something. He visits her and other people in the area and finds out that another guy, Vic Bazinet, may have been involved in Eben’s death.
At this point in the investigation, as Bowditch is starting to think that he’s being deliberately misdirected by the people of Pill Hill, he gets a call from Dani, the state trooper with whom he has some type of relationship. She is all excited because she is about to get a new job with the Portland Police Department which she really wants. He’s happy for her since the relationship has run its course.
Mike trudges on to talk to one more person who may know something. Felice, Vic Bazinet’s daughter, was fooling around with the boyfriend of another Pill Hill resident, Tina, who hates her and may have steered Mike to the Bazinets just for spite. Vic supposedly found Eben Chamberlin’s flotation vest that would have probably saved him from drowning had he been wearing it. Felice says that Vic is out-of-town which Mike is pretty sure is a lie. Felice has no use for most of her neighbors and doesn’t seem to quite belong with the Pill Hill crowd. She graduated from Colby and had a good career. She married a guy from Georgia who turned out to be a jerk who had shady business dealings, and he was constantly cheating on her. Although Felice was pregnant, she left him and moved back to Maine to her father’s house.
Felice badmouths Bibi whom she says was about to be disinherited from Eben’s will. Felice also has no use for Tori and Tiffany and Arlo and all of their relatives and associates who live on Pill Hill.
Meanwhile, in the parallel story about Mike’s night trying to survive in the woods, he is limping along, trying to get away from whomever is shooting at him. He keeps moving, having no idea if his pursuer is tracking him. He has to walk/limp across a frozen pond to get away. Shadow is there to lead the way. The wolf dog weighs less than Mike, but the weight-to-footprint ratio is about the same for a big dog and a human, so the ice is safe to cross. Shadow leads him to a beaver lodge, which is a good place to hide from someone who is trying to kill you. Before Mike can get to the shelter, someone starts shooting at him. Mike presumes it is Bruce Jewett. Mike has no weapon but he has to stop the person with the rifle. He climbs a tree and jumps on the shooter who is searching for him to finish the job. Mike stabs the shooter with a knife he always carries and he finds out that the person is not Bruce - it’s Tori Dillon. He goes after the wounded twin and hears snowmobiles approaching which he figures are reinforcements for Tori. Shadow shows up and terrifies Tori which allows Mike to catch her and steal her snowmobile with which he hopes to get away from Tori’s buddies.
Mike interrupts his escape in the stolen snowmobile to help a drunk driver who had an accident and went off the road in the middle of the cold night. Being a good Samaritan gives Tori’s twin, Tiffany, and her buddy – both on faster snowmobiles – a chance to catch up to Mike and start shooting at him. He manages to not get hit but the drunk driver is killed by a stray bullet. Mike uses Tori’s phone that was in her snowmobile to call for police help. They’re on their way.
Before help gets there, Mike gets grazed and knocked out by a truck driven by Tiff Dillon who manages to hit a tree and get killed. Mike wakes up tied up and guarded by Tori and her relatives who have big rifles pointed at him. They put him into the back of an SUV and drive off.
Mike is in trouble. He’s tied up in the SUV and outnumbered by crazy people who want him dead. He overhears some snatches of their conversation. They are taking him to his death and he realizes that these people aren’t the Dillons. They’re the Dows, a clan of drug dealers, extortionists, and insurance cheats that Mike brought down. Two Dow brothers, the ringleaders, ended up dead. One died in the shootout and the other was killed in prison. The Dows blamed both deaths on Mike. That’s why these people hate him. The remaining Dows changed their name to Dillon and moved to an isolated part of Maine where they reset their drug trade. Once they realized that Warden Bowditch was on the case of Eben Chamberlain's death, they saw their chance to get even.
Meanwhile, back in the back of the SUV, Mike is trying to figure out how to get out of this mess. He is fully conscious now and remembers that he still has the knife that he stabbed Tori with a few hours ago. He uses the knife to get his hands free. The good news is that he has the knife; the bad news is that a dozen Dows surround him, many with weapons. Tori is about to use a chainsaw on our hero. Bruce Jewett, Eben’s lover and likely murderer, is there, and Grambo, whose real name is Tempest, orders Jewett to hold Mike down. He refuses, just as the police sirens can be heard. Mike takes advantage of the moment to grab Tempest and hold the knife to her throat. She is yelling for someone to shoot Bowditch. Instead she gets shot and Tori tries to shoot Mike who shoots her first. Both twins and several other Dows die that day.
Bruce Jewett is arrested for killing Chamberlain and the DA has a strong case against him. Arlo got nailed for drug dealing. Many of the Dows who survived the gunfight were arrested for various nefarious illegal activities.
Mike finds out that Felice Bazinet called the police to tell them where Mike would probably be taken. It was an old barn that the Dows used to do dirty deeds. She wasn't part of the bad things, but people around her were.
A few days before Christmas, Mike gets out of the hospital and goes home. The national media was all over the story for a day or two, but they are on to other things. Dani visited him while he was recovering and they are no longer an item. Stacey, his long-time, on-and-off again girlfriend, has returned from working out-of-state, and they have talked on the phone but that’s all. For a few days before Christmas, Mike goes out looking for the dog-wolf who has disappeared. Mike should be resting but he wants to find Shadow.
On Christmas Day, Mike finally finds Shadow near where they went into the river at the beginning of the book. Mike fed him a frozen turkey he was going to cook for Christmas dinner. When Mike pulls into his driveway he sees that his house has been decorated for Christmas. The Cronk family had decorated it.
You know how it ends. A lot of his friends surprise him inside the house, including his on-and-off-again girlfriend, Stacey. It is a great ending.
Bob’s Take
This is the eleventh book in the Mike Bowditch series. I have read them all. This one is a bit different in that the author alternates chapters recounting Mike’s initial crash into the river with chapters about the investigation that led to someone trying to kill him by putting spikes on a dangerous road over water. The device works in the book, but it’s hard to summarize it coherently.
These books are a how-to-do guide to understanding and surviving in the wilderness. You learn a lot about first aid for people, treating a gunshot wound, how animals survive the winter, and what birds can teach you about what’s happening on the ground.
Weather is a major player in these tales. Winter is a big deal in Maine, but some of the books are set in the summer, with storms and heat wreaking havoc with the plot and characters.
Romance weaves in and out of the books. There are a few women that Mike Bowditch is smitten with in the various books. Stacey Stevens, whose parents are Mike’s best friends, has been around since the early books. She is a feisty wildlife biologist whose job complements Mike’s work as a game warden. She routinely quits whatever job she has because of a dispute with management, but she always comes back, perhaps a book or two later.
Animals are major elements in the books. In Maine, a game warden is a fully authorized police officer as well as a protector of wildlife. Mike spends as much time helping animals get away from threatening situations as he does assisting human beings.
These are interesting books to read that are very well written. I am looking forward to the next one.
