Dead by Dawn
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch finds himself in a life-or-death chase in this next thriller in the bestselling series by Edgar Award nominee Paul Doiron, Dead by Dawn.
Mike Bowditch is fighting for his life. After being ambushed on a dark winter road, Bowditch crashes his Jeep into a frozen river. Trapped beneath the ice in the middle of nowhere, having lost his gun and any way to signal for help, Mike fights his way to the surface. But surviving the crash is only the first challenge. Whoever set the trap that ran him off the road is still out there, and they’re coming for him.
Hours earlier, Mike had been called to investigate the suspicious drowning of a wealthy professor. Despite the death being ruled an accident, the victim's elegant, eccentric daughter-in-law insists the man was murdered. She suspects his companion that day, a reclusive survivalist and conspiracy theorist who accompanied the professor on his fateful duck-hunting trip—but what exactly was the nature of their relationship? And was her own sharp-tongued daughter, who inherited the dead man’s fortune, as close to her grandfather as she claims? The accusations lead Mike to a sinister local family who claim to have information on the crime. But when his Jeep flies into the river and unknown armed assailants on snowmobiles chase him through the wilderness, the investigation turns into a fight for survival.
As Mike faces a nightlong battle to stay alive, he must dissect the hours leading up to the ambush and solve two riddles: which one of these people desperately want him dead, and what has he done to incur their wrath?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Edgar finalist Doiron's nail-biting 12th mystery featuring Maine game warden Mike Bowditch (after 2020's One Last Lie), Bowditch runs his Jeep off the road into the icy Androscoggin River after his tires are shredded by metal spikes intentionally left in the road. The game warden escapes from his submerged vehicle, but he risks hypothermia. Flash back to earlier that morning. Mariëtte Chamberlain asks Bowditch, who has a reputation for solving cold cases, to reinvestigate her father-in-law's death. Four years earlier, professor Eben Chamberlain, formerly of the British foreign service, was duck hunting on the Androscoggin when he apparently fell out of his boat and drowned. Since Chamberlain, according to Mariëtte, never would have taken off his life vest, she suspects foul play. Bowditch agrees to do a little digging and is soon headed for trouble. Doiron builds tension by alternating between his lead's battle to survive and the inquiry into Chamberlain's death, which he effectively doles out in small segments. This entry stands as the best yet in a superior series.
Customer Reviews
Well crafted genre fiction
Author
American. English graduate of Yale, MFA at Emerson College. Now writes crime novels featuring an indestructible Maine game warden named Mike Bowditch. The author’s choice of setting and subject matter is hardly surprising given that he was born and raised in Maine, lives on a trout stream and is a registered marine guide specialising in fly fishing, as well as being editor of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, a member of the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Humanities Council.
In brief
The novel opens with our boy in his Jeep on a twisting mountainside road a few days before Christmas, a rescued wolf in a cage in the back, and dusk fast approaching. He rounds a blind bend, shreds all four tyres on a mass of steel spikes deliberately laid in the road, careens over a precipice, and crashes through the ice covered surface of a fast flowing river. Against all odds, he gets out (the pooch too), and narrowly staves off death from hypothermia, only to find himself at imminent risk of in the sights of a hunter with a high powered rifle and a snowmobile. Make that hunters. And you think you’re having a bad day. There follow an abundance of twists and turns, both literal and metaphorical. Our hero soaks up an improbable amount of physical punishment but gets the baddies in the end.
Writing
Third person from POV of the main protagonist with alternating chapters that move back and forth in time providing details of our boy’s day leading up to the ambush, along with relevant personal backstory, while updating us on his ongoing travails. Clear, crisp prose. Breathless pace. Blood and guts aplenty.
Bottom line
Highly professional genre fiction, and a refreshing change from city-based cops-and-robbers stories. Disclaimer: This is my first Mike Bowditch novel. I suspect I might not have found it quite so refreshing had I read many (?any) of the 11 previous ones.