Trespasser

Trespasser
by Paul Doiron
Minotaur Books, 2011. 310 pgs. Mystery.

When game warden Mike Bowditch is called out late one night for a car/deer crash on the Parker Point Road he arrives in time only to find the damaged car but no deer and no driver. He figures the deer has been poached post-mortem, but where is the young Asian woman who told the tow truck driver someone was coming to pick her up. He shouldn't have been worried to turn the whole mess over to the Highway Patrol, but he was. His concerns are borne out when he and his old pal Charley discover Ashley Kim's brutalized body. The police tell Mike to back off but he can't; he feels responsible and is drawn farther into the mystery when the current homicide mirrors one from some years back when a girl was murdered in the same fashion. The Maine coast in a wintry early Spring is the perfect cold and foggy setting for the monstrous doings of a man no one yet suspects. Second in the Mike Bowditch mystery series, after Poacher's Son, Trespasser is a fine story of a good but deeply conflicted man fighting his own demons as he takes on the very real devil next door.

LW