Book Review: Dead Man’s Wake by Paul Doiron

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.