Sadly I could not get into the story, I needed it to catch my attention and keep me invested. Dnf. It wasn’t for me but I think others will like it.

Thank you to St.Martins Press and Netgalley for my gifted copy

Paul Doiron’s 14th installment in his Mike Bowditch, Maine game warden series, certainly does not disappoint! Having read most of his previous books in this series, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review his newest novel, Dead Man’s Wake. This is an extremely well-written novel with particularly likeable characters and a setting that compares to none.
Maine game warden, Mike Bowditch and his fiancée Stacey Stevens witness a horrific hit and run boating accident while swimming at night in a dark lake in central Maine. However, all is not what it seems. After some careful investigation, Mike begins to wonder if it is really just a freak boating accident or something more sinister like murder?
Mike has been through a lot in his short service as a Maine game warden and for some reason trouble always seems to find Mike. It doesn’t seem to matter if Mike is dispatched to the rocky Midcoast of Maine or to the beautiful sight of the blueberry barrens in Washington County, threats and danger follow Mike.
The setting in Dead Man’s Wake truly adds a bit of beauty in this gritty and fast-paced mystery. As a Maine native living all my life here, I have traveled the state extensively and throughout the entire novel I could totally relate to the setting Doiron has described. It almost seemed with Doiron’s incredible descriptions of the various towns, lakes, rivers, and forests, the setting almost became another character.
While Dead Man’s Wake can be read as a standalone novel, I highly suggest reading the previous novels in this series. They are guaranteed to entertain and keep the reader engaged and excited to read more from this authentic series.
I want to thank, Netgalley, Paul Doiron, and the publishing company for the opportunity to read this ARC. I leave an honest and voluntary review. I rate this novel with a 5 out of 5 rating.
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At last, patient readers can raise a glass to true love: Stacey Stevens and Mike Bowditch’s engagement has been a long time coming.

“It’s a wonder that all marriages don’t end in murder-suicides,” said my stepfather’s new wife, Jubilee.



Neil, my stepdad, nearly spit out his decaf.



It was the evening of Stacey’s and my engagement party.



In the five years since my mom had died, Neil Turner and I had drifted apart. We had never been close to begin with, but he and his Jubilee had decided to have a celebratory dinner for us at their lake house in central Maine, over the Labor Day weekend. They had invited Stacey’s parents, Charley and Ora Stevens, who had flown down from the North Woods in their Cessna 182 bush plane. Now the six of us were gathered in the great room, enjoying our blueberry pie and coffee while a warm breeze ruffled the curtains.

Jubilee’s remarks foreshadow the evening’s events. The group discusses “the dreaded 9-1-1 calls that cops termed domestics.” Charley (now retired) and Mike are Maine game wardens, lawmen who’ve each seen “a lot of shit.” Mike is distracted by sounds coming from the lake: even though night has fallen, “some idiot on a Jet Ski was still buzzing about.” Stacey points out Mike’s not working, that it isn’t his district, but he’s not easily deterred. They head outside but all they see is a speeding watercraft that leaves a giant wake after it zooms into the middle of the lake. Mike is persuaded to go back to the gathering when everyone hears a collision: “the noise was more of a percussive thump rather than the explosion of fiberglass and metal you might expect from a motorboat striking a hard object at fifty miles per hour.”

As a Maine Game Warden Investigator, Mike Bowditch has spent innumerable hours on the water, as has his fiancée: they know why a “vague thud” is noteworthy.

“Could that boat have hit the Jet Ski?” Stacey asked.



“The crash would have been louder. Both boats would’ve gone spinning, and the Jet Ski would have broken apart.”

When they see the lone motorboat slowing down in the middle of the lake, they’re suspicious. Mike calls it: “They just turned off their running lights. They know they hit something. They’re hoping to slip away in the dark.” Mike is on it—he asks Neil for the keys to his Leisure Kraft, but Neil says he’ll take him out. From her wheelchair, Ora grabs her phone, to ask the local warden to come to the scene but Neil says there’s no game warden assigned to their district, due to unexpected circumstances. The lakes association privately hired a lake constable, Galen Webb, to pick up the slack. Seeking to reassure Mike, Neil says, “Galen’s a solid young man. Very polite and responsible. We’ve received few complaints about him all summer.” Mike is not impressed.

The Warden Service brass talked a lot about the importance of practicing courtesy, but it was my belief, having dealt with dozens of Maine’s worst scofflaws, that a law enforcement officer who receives no complaints can’t be doing their job responsibly.

No wonder that Mike and his superiors frequently don’t see eye to eye. For a glimpse at an earlier time in Mike’s career, check out “Snakebit“.

Read an Excerpt of “Snakebit”
Neil, Charley (champing at the bit), Mike, and Stacey head to the Leisure Kraft; emergency medical technician Stacey has her trauma kit in tow. The Stevens family knows, through years of experience, that this is “potentially a rescue—or worse, a recovery—mission and not a moonlight cruise.” Stacey tells the group that she doesn’t have a good feeling about it. Charley acts as first mate to inexperienced captain Neil. When they reach their destination, their beam picks up an object, “for an instant, there was a metallic shimmer.” Charley served in Vietnam: he knows immediately what it is.

He looked sadly at his daughter. “I wish you’d been wrong about your feelings.”



Stacey put a hand to her mouth. “Oh no.”



“What? What are you looking at?” Neil left the wheel unattended, and the boat listed as his weight combined with ours on the starboard side. “What is it?”



The object floating beneath the surface of the lake was a severed human arm.

Ever practical, Stacey whispers, “Where’s the rest of him?” Mike, Stacey, and Charley are on automatic pilot, their years of experience coming to the fore. Intrepid Charley dives below the surface. Is it likely that they will step back and let the locals take charge? Hardly, particularly after Galen Webb arrives on the scene. Mike soon deduces Galen is incapable of leading the investigation, he’s so wet behind the ears. Galen suggests ways he might help, like circling his boat to better spotlight the lake bottom.

“It would be better not to start the engine while Warden Stevens is submerged.”



“Right! Of course.”



I understood the constable’s compulsion to act for the sake of acting. It had been my first instinct as a young officer, too. I hadn’t yet learned that busyness isn’t the same as progress.



“You could help me out by calling dispatch,” I said.



“Sure thing!” Then he cocked his head. “How do I explain this, exactly?”



In fairness, it was a good question.

All is revealed the next morning: “the warden dive team recovers not one but two naked corpses: a dismembered man and the married woman with whom he was having an affair.” The deaths were no accident. And Mike still hasn’t identified the driver of the boat that sped off into the middle of the lake, in the middle of the night.

Longtime readers might have predicted exactly this sort of engagement weekend for Mike and Stacey. All sympathy to Neil and Jubilee, who unexpectedly are the hosts of two (or should it be three, including Charley?) keen investigators, an intelligent but ailing future mother-in-law, and all the unexpected consequences of a Mike Bowditch-led investigation.

Two quotes illuminate Dead Man’s Wake: the first uttered by Roger Finch of the Maine State Police when he shows up on the scene: “I should have known you were involved in this shit show, Bowditch. What’s that line said by Dirty Harry? ‘People have a nasty habit of getting dead around you.’” The other is the book’s epigraph: Beware the fury of a patient man. –John Dryden. Neil and Jubilee live on a storied lake, one that “served as the inspiration for the play—and later the movie On Golden Pond.” It’s rich with history, stories, feuds, and smoldering disagreements. Mike and Stacey are in considerable danger from a furious, “patient man” who will not stop at two watery deaths.

Dead Man’s Wake is the fourteenth in Paul Doiron’s Mike Bowditch series—the mysteries are absorbing and cleverly plotted, but watching Mike Bowditch mature, knowing that he’s almost always the smartest man in the room, is equally felicitous. Bring on June 2024 for #15.

I really enjoyed dead man’s wake! It was so twisty and I had no idea what was going to happen. The characters were great and I couldn’t stop reading. I look forward to reading more by this author.

- Mystery series
- Part of a series
- Suspense

The festivities at the engagement celebration of Game Warden Mike and Stacey are interrupted by a boating accident...and the discovery of an arm. The rest is found later, along with another individual. Mike's radar starts humming and he doesn't thnk this is a simple accident, especially when the victims' connections are discovered.

Now Mike and others have to find the unaliver before they get away. So much action, so many twists. This book was so good. It can be read as a standalone as enough backstory on the characters is given.

This is the first book I have read by this author and I will be looking for more. I absolutely loved this book and read it in one day. I would definitely recommend this book.

Real Rating: 4.25* of five

Picking this series up after dropping it after <I>Bad Little Falls</I> (book #3), for no particular reason I can recall, I'm glad to say I got the hang of things again right quick.

Mike's in a place I wouldn't necessarily have predicted back then, what with planning to marry Stacey, but there we are. What hasn't changed much is this sarcastic, tangy dude's ability to offend everyone while doing far too good a job to get his smart mouth fired.

Stacey feels like a fairly generic character, if I'm honest, but then again who really cares about the sleuth's love interest? She doesn't simply exist to take up space like Bruno's lady-friends in Martin Walker's <I>Bruno, Chief of Police</I>series; she has skills and uses them with Mike's investigation in this story. I remembered her name as Jamie, but either this is a different woman or my memory is wrong.

The plot starts out really strong, again as remembered from Author Doiron's earlier books. The events start weird and grisly early on. A lot of names are thrown at you from the start, which is often the case in series mysteries at this stage of their run. Here I suppose I'm running on the assumption that these characters are as I remember them. If they aren't, well...serves me right for being away more than ten books.

What the reader of series mysteries looks for, as far as I can see, is the sense that ma'at is served, that the Rightness of things is restored when the crime is solved. Murder is a gross insult to the body politic no matter who's killed; yes, even if it's someone who needs killin', responsibility must be apportioned or the precedent it sets is unthinkably dangerous. That's what I felt about this particular murder, TBH. Understandable that someone taking your spouse away from you would piss you off; but then again, why was said spouse in play, exactly? And no one's gonna support the old-fashioned sense that a man's wife is his, as in his property, in the twenty-first century.

Maine's as much of a character as any human was. The atmospherics will either immerse you in the setting (me) or make you a crazy person. Particularly prominent in this outing is information on boating that will quite possibly make some wish for an acute drought to dry up the whole state. Maine's unusually powerful wardens...power of arrest?! really?...make this series a procedural of the sort I enjoy. It's detailed without feeling, to me at least, dense and chewy. It doesn't hurt that I feel Mike's spiny, acerbic nature makes him a kindred spirit. Stacey is detailed enough to give me the slightly uncomfortable feeling she sees herself as "riding herd" on her man. I don't know this; she's developed over eleven books since I met her in book three. If indeed this is the same woman....

You already know I picked up the next one, so my vote is in. Good series.

Great read. I have never read this author before but truly enjoyed this and will be looking for his previous books, hoping they are this good
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher!

Special thanks to St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books, Paul Doiron and NetGalley for an e-arc of this novel.

It was a fast-paced, easy to read, and interesting page turner of a thriller. It's #4 in the series. I read it as a stand-alone. I thinks it would probably be good to read the whole series. I still enjoyed it though.

This was so well written. I was engrossed from the first page and it ticked all the boxes of my expectations . I would definitely recommend to others.

This was a suspenseful and riveting law enforcement procedural with a compelling setting that's easy to lose yourself in!

This was my first Doiron book. Given that, I obviously haven't read anything in the series before this point, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit and didn't feel lost.

Doiron does a great job with breadcrumbs to remind the reader of character details or help a new-to-the-series/standalone reader to understand things, without bogging down the book in unnecessary details.

Mike's a bit of a prickly character who might not be for everyone, but I enjoyed my time with him and see myself dipping in and out of this series when I want something meaty and gripping.

Many thanks to Netgalley for this book. I received this book in exchange for my honest review. Thoughts are entirely my own.

In this novel we are following Mike on another adventure. While at his stepparents lake house for his engagement party a boat is seen racing on the lake and then a noise and heard. Mike and his future father in law and his fiancé go to investigate and discover an arm. They find a man and his mistress who were staying at his wife’s family lake house. Mouse Island has been in the wife’s family for years and the wife has MS which means she doesn’t travel and Mike has to go talk to her at her home in another state where his boat is sabotaged. The wife’s brother who works for a secret government agency and wanted to kill him with the wife pretending not to know. Sadly we are unable to find out his exact motives because he is killed before he could say more. Mike and his fiancé are married at their home at the end of the book.

Interesting storyline with plenty of twists and turns. I'm usually a cozy mystery reader, but this was a fun change in mystery genres. I didn't realize there were so many previous books in the series, but I had no trouble following along.
I'm looking forward to reading more books in this series.

Many thanks to St. Martin's Press/Minotaur and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. My thoughts and opinions are my own and without bias or favor or expectation.

I enjoyed this next book in the Maine game warden Mike Bowditch series. During an engagement celebration at Mike's stepfather's lake home, he and Stacey hear a boat crash into something and upon investigating (with the help of Charley) find a severed arm in the lake, followed by a body. Later on, another body is discovered and the investigation is on to find the boat and then figure out how these two people died and whodunit. This has a healthy dose of my favorite character, Charley, and it also comes with a health scare for Ora. This is a page-turner right down to the last page, and I also loved the ending!

I am happy to have discovered this mystery series by Paul Doiron. This is the 14th book in the series, and the first book in the series that I'd read. I had no trouble at all following the plot, and the author introduces each character so skillfully that the reader is not lost. The setting of the story is in rural Maine.

The author does an excellent job of introducing the topography of the region without it becoming a lecture, and his descriptions of various places made me want to visit this state. Maine has it all, from mountains to beaches, and so much water - many streams, rivers and it borders on the Atlantic Ocean. This book was set in a part of Maine where the roads were frequently washed out and most of the transportation by the main characters was on foot or by canoe or boat. Their large fauna include bears including Grizzly bears and moose (also dangerous). One unique difference in this part of Maine is that a lot of transportation is by boat.

Mike Bowditch is a game warden investigator, which is similar to a police detective. Mike and his fiance Stacy see a man run over by a boat, which leaves the scene.The next day, two corpses are retrieved from the lake - a man and a woman who were suspected of having an affair. The plot is complicated with multiple suspects and several people behaving oddly. I was not able to guess the culprit.

I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher St. Martin's Press vis NetGalley, and voluntarily read and reviewed it.

Oh this was good! Fun cover and very suspenseful. Full of murder and danger, this will keep you hooked and on your toes!

I didn't realize this book was the 14th book in the Mike Bowditch series when I was requesting it. I just genuinely thought it sounded like a great read. I found that even though this was an established series, it was easy to jump in and I didn't feel like I missed anything. This book was great and I will absolutely be starting the series from book 1 eventually. 4 stars.

📖 Just finished "Dead Man's Wake" by Paul Doiron and it's another thrilling mystery that kept me on the edge of my seat! 💥 When a man is seemingly run over by a boat near Mike and Stacy's engagement dinner, it sets off a chain of events that lead to multiple investigations and plenty of chaos. 🕵️‍♂️ With its engaging plot and dynamic characters, this latest installment in the series is a must-read for mystery lovers! 🌟 Can't wait for more adventures with Paul and companions! #DeadMansWake #PaulDoiron #Mystery #BookReview 🚤

Dead Man's Wake has an intriguing premise that revolves around a hit-and-run speedboat accident that transforms into a murder investigation. However, the story fails to live up to its potential and leaves the reader underwhelmed. Despite my hopes that the storyline would change directions and captivate me, it never quite delivered. While it had its occasional moments, it ultimately left me wanting more.

Voluntarily reviewed after receiving a free copy courtesy of NetGalley, the Publisher, and the author, Paul Doiron.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. Mysteries and thrills are abundant in this novel, which was riveting start to finish.