New Review: “Snakebit” A Mike Bowditch Short Mystery by Paul Doiron

“Snakebit” is a satisfying amuse bouche from Paul Doiron, a vignette from warden Mike Bowditch’s past that doesn’t follow the events of Hatchet Island, published in June 2022. Dead Man’s Wake, the 14th in the series, drops June 27th. “Snakebit” shows us Bowditch as a junior game warden. His personality, his relationship with his co-workers, and how he handles an investigation has evolved, although even then, Bowditch didn’t suffer fools gladly, nor he was reticent to share his expertise.

According to the Maine government, there are no poisonous snakes in Maine. 

When a teenager arrives at a Maine hospital with a rattlesnake bite, warden Mike Bowditch is baffled. Rattlesnakes have been extinct in the region for over a hundred years—so where did this one come from?

A nameless woman on the phone swears to Bowditch, “she’d just seen a rattlesnake on her hike up Black Cat Mountain.” No, she hadn’t taken a picture because she ran away terrified. When asked for a description of the snake, she rightly suspects she’s not believed. Bowditch launches into a description of the history of rattlers in Maine (i.e., “people wiped them out in the nineteenth century”). 

The woman hadn’t come to him for a lecture in herpetology, but Bowditch was prone to over explanation, a character defect in himself he seemed incapable of correcting, which suggested he didn’t view it as a defect requiring correction. 

That night, Tommy Volk, the warden who patrols the district next to him, calls Bowditch. “You’re not going to believe this,” Volk said. “I just got a call from a buddy of mine who drives an ambulance for Sebago EMS. He and his partner are transporting a kid to Maine Med who was bitten by a rattlesnake.” Bowditch asks if the kid, Jax Stevenson, was bitten on Black Cat Mountain, but Volk says, “it was at a keg party in a gravel pit in Casco.” The kid “who rushed to the rescue beat it to death with a two-by-four,” and then took a picture which he sent to Volk. Volk invites Bowditch to come with him when he retrieves the dead rattler, adding, “You studied natural history at Colby, right?” “In fact, Bowditch had majored in human history but he saw no reason to correct Volk, who was not alone in the Warden Service in considering him to be overeducated and therefore suspect.” 

The snake carcass is on ice at the Mallard Mart in Bridgton. Bowditch is intrigued by the situation: “he’d been feeling bored and stuck in his job, but this bizarre incident had shaken him out of his mild depression.” Nothing like a case that “fully engaged” his mind to get him back on track. Since rattlesnakes aren’t native to Maine, someone had brought a rattlesnake to the kegger. Was Jax “the victim of a crime or simply gross misfortune?” There’s yet another rattler in the picture. On his way to meeting Bowditch, Volk “found another rattler squashed on Route 11.” Ricky, a brash young man at the Mallard Mart shares his opinion: “I was just telling Warden B. here that this snake probably belonged to the Goreckis. Can you believe he’d never heard of them before?” Volk is surprised.

“Seriously? I guess Ted and Fay have been out of the news for a while. But you must know their run-down farm on the Rolfe Brook Road. It’s the one with the razor wire fence and the Keep Out signs and general air of decrepitude. So you think the Goreckis have decided to reintroduce rattlesnakes to Maine on their own, Ricky?”

 

“I’m just extrapolating based on the geography and Ted’s reputation as a herpetologist, not that I’ve ever met the man.”

The department employees in Augusta—from the state biologists to “the license clerks in their cubicles,” are agog to at the dead rattler “stretched across Bowditch’s tailgate,” until the commissioner shuts down the photo op, threatening dire retribution if anything shows up online. Bowditch is true to form, correcting the commissioner when she says she won’t have folks panicking about “poisonous snakes in Casco.”  

It was generally known in the building that no one talked back to the commissioner, least of all a junior warden.

 

“Poisonous means that they’re dangerous to eat. Venomous means that they secrete toxins to paralyze and kill their prey.”

Silence from the assembled crowd. The commissioner snaps at Bowditch to “stop acting like a teenager and get back to the work the state pays you to do,” but he ignores her and heads to the office where archives of permits are kept. Who had permission to keep restricted species on their property? It doesn’t take long for the higher-ups to tell Bowditch to back off. His thoughts on that are quintessential Mike Bowditch.

At age twenty-seven, Mike Bowditch refused to be anyone’s fool.

He was under no obligation to continue pursuing the case. Maybe the better part of valor here would be to surrender the case to Volk.

And yet he understood himself well enough to know it wasn’t in his character to fold his tents and steal away into the desert under the cover of night.

He would persist because it was who he was and all he knew how to do.

Bowditch is persistent, preternaturally curious, and intelligent, never taking no for an answer. Major Patrick Shorey, second-in-command of the Warden Service, considers “Bowditch to be an arrogant, insubordinate asshole and the worst hiring mistake he’d made.” Bowditch knows how to rattle cages and Doiron is an expert at whetting our whistle for the next full-length Bowditch mystery. Enjoy “Snakebit,” it’s a great read!