One Last Lie

Starred review from June 1, 2020
Edgar finalist Doiron artfully blends a whodunit plot with superior characterizations in his top-notch 11th mystery featuring Mike Bowditch, who works for the Maine Warden Service (after 2019’s After Midnight). Bowditch rushes back home to Maine from Florida, where he was checking out the background of a prospective new warden, after getting a call from Ora Stevens, the wife of Bowditch’s longtime mentor and friend, Charley. Ora hasn’t seen or heard from Charley since he abruptly left home a few days earlier. The day before Charley departed, he got into an argument with a man at a roadside pop-up bazaar, because the man was selling an old game warden badge. Bowditch finds a note Charley left behind in which he expresses the fear he’s made “the worst mistake a man can make in this life,” one that potentially threatens his loved ones. These clues lead Bowditch to probe an incident in Charley’s past he hadn’t known about—Charley’s fatal shooting of a man suspected of murdering a warden who had gone undercover to bust a poaching ring. Doiron vividly portrays the Maine woods setting while maintaining taut suspense. This entry reinforces the author’s position in the front rank of regional thriller writers. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary.

June 1, 2020
Mike Bowditch's eleventh adventure (after Almost Midnight, 2019) opens in Florida, where Mike is investigating a candidate for the Maine Warden Service and helping with a python roundup in the Everglades. He returns to an equally hot, humid, and very buggy Maine, only to end up travelling north to the Canadian border in search of his mentor Charley Stevens. Charley found an old badge at a flea market that prompted him to reconsider a 15-year-old case involving a young warden who never returned from an undercover mission involving a notorious poaching ring. Mike follows his trail, and, despite Charley's advice to never trust a man without secrets, he soon finds that men with secrets, including fellow law-enforcement officers, can't be trusted either. Finding the truth puts him in danger from attack dogs, car wrecks, and deadly currents that require savvy canoe paddling. Doiron's masterful plotting pulls it all together, and the reader gets to meet an odd assortment of extraordinarily well-defined characters?good guys and bad?while learning more about both the natural and the political history of the Pine Tree State.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)