Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find a cryptic message on his answering machine from his father, Jack, who he hasn't heard from in two years. The next morning Mike gets a call from the police: a beloved local cop has been killed and his father is their prime suspect. Coming to terms with his haunted past and desperate for answers, Mike and a retired warden pilot journey deep into the Maine wilderness to clear his father's name and find out why Jack is on the run. But the only way for Mike to save his father is to find the real killer before the killer finds him.

In Paul Doiron’s riveting follow-up to his Edgar Award–nominated novel, The Poacher's Son, Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s quest to find a missing woman leads him through a forest of lies in search of a killer who may have gotten away with murder once before. While on patrol one foggy March evening, Bowditch receives a call for help. A woman has reportedly struck a deer on a lonely coast road. When the game warden arrives on the scene, he finds blood in the road—but both the driver and the deer have vanished. And the state trooper assigned to the accident appears strangely unconcerned. The details of the disappearance seem eerily familiar. Seven years earlier, a jury convicted lobsterman Erland Jefferts of the rape and murder of a wealthy college student and sentenced him to life in prison. For all but his most fanatical defenders, justice was served. But when the missing woman is found brutalized in a manner that suggests Jefferts may have been framed, Bowditch receives an ominous warning from state prosecutors to stop asking questions. For Bowditch, whose own life was recently shattered by a horrific act of violence, doing nothing is not an option. His clandestine investigation reopens old wounds between Maine locals and rich summer residents and puts both his own life and that of the woman he loves in jeopardy. As he closes in on his quarry, he suddenly discovers how dangerous his opponents are, and how far they will go to prevent him from bringing a killer to justice.

Maine game warden Mike Bowditch has been sent into exile, transferred by his superiors to a remote outpost on the Canadian border. When a blizzard descends on the coast, Bowditch is called to the rustic cabin of a terrified couple. A raving and half-frozen man has appeared at their door, claiming his friend is lost in the storm. But what starts as a rescue mission in the wilderness soon becomes a baffling murder investigation. The dead man is a notorious drug dealer, and state police detectives suspect it was his own friend who killed him. Bowditch isn’t so sure, but his vow not to interfere in the case is tested when he finds himself powerfully attracted to a beautiful woman with a dark past and a troubled young son. The boy seems to know something about what really happened in the blizzard, but he is keeping his secrets locked in a cryptic notebook, and Mike fears for the safety of the strange child. Meanwhile, an anonymous tormentor has decided to make the new warden’s life a living hell. Alone and outgunned, Bowditch turns for assistance to his old friend, the legendary bush pilot Charley Stevens. But in this snowbound landscape -— where smugglers wage blood feuds by night -— help seems very far away indeed. If Bowditch is going to catch a killer, he must survive on his own wits and discover strength he never knew he possessed.

On an unseasonably hot October morning, Bowditch is called to the scene of a bizarre crime: the corpses of seven moose have been found senselessly butchered on the estate of Elizabeth Morse, a wealthy animal rights activist who is buying up huge parcels of timber land to create a new national park. What at first seems like mindless slaughter—retribution by locals for the job losses Morse's plan is already causing in the region—becomes far more sinister when a shocking murder is discovered and Mike's investigation becomes a hunt to find a ruthless killer. In order to solve the controversial case, Bowditch risks losing everything he holds dear: his best friends, his career as a law enforcement officer, and the love of his life. The beauty and magnificence of the Maine woods is the setting for a story of suspense and violence when one powerful woman’s missionary zeal comes face to face with ruthless cruelty.

Legendary Maine woodsman and bush pilot Charley Stevens tries to convince young Mike Bowditch of the dangers awaiting rookie game wardens.

For the first time in print, Skin and Bones features a collection of eight gripping original short stories in the bestselling Mike Bowditch series―including one brand new, never-before-published story―from Edgar-award nominated author Paul Doiron. In THE BEAR TRAP, legendary Maine woodsman and bush pilot Charley Stevens tries to convince young Mike of the dangers awaiting rookie game wardens. RABID draws Mike into the story of a gruesome case involving a bat with rabies from his Charley Steven’s past (2019 Edgar award nominee for Best Short Story). When a visiting hunter goes missing in the middle of a snowstorm, a young Charley Stevens sets off to rescue him―but begins to suspect the man may not want to be found in BACKTRACK. In THE IMPOSTER, Mike is confronted with a baffling case of stolen identity when he discovers a dead body whose driver’s license claims he is none other than Mike Bowditch himself. Mike tracks down a sinister prowler who turns a couple's dream vacation home into a nightmare in THE CARETAKER. An investigation into the killing of a bald eagle in SKIN AND BONES unearths an old case of a missing young man whose physically abusive brother might have murdered him. In SNAKEBIT, Mike must hunt down a killer who uses the unlikeliest of murder weapons: rattlesnakes. (Brand New!) Mike suspects there’s more to a grisly murder-suicide than meets the eye in SHEEP’S CLOTHING. Critically acclaimed for his brilliant crime novels, Paul Doiron proves he is also the master of short story in Skin and Bones.

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, Mike Bowditch has left the Maine Warden Service and is working as a fishing guide in the North Woods. But when his mentor Sgt. Kathy Frost is forced to kill a troubled war veteran in an apparent case of "suicide by cop," he begins having second thoughts about his decision. Now Kathy finds herself the target of a government inquiry and outrage from the dead soldier's platoon mates. Soon she finds herself in the sights of a sniper, as well. When the sergeant is shot outside her farmhouse, Mike joins the hunt to find the mysterious man responsible. To do so, the ex-warden must plunge into his friend's secret past—even as a beautiful woman from Mike's own past returns, throwing into jeopardy his tentative romance with wildlife biologist Stacey Stevens. As Kathy Frost lies on the brink of death and a dangerous shooter stalks the blueberry barrens of central Maine, Bowditch is forced to confront the choices he has made and determine, once and for all, the kind of man he truly is, in The Bone Orchard by Paul Doiron.

In this riveting new novel from Edgar finalist Paul Doiron, Bowditch joins a desperate search for two missing hikers as Maine wildlife officials deal with a frightening rash of coyote attacks. When two young female hikers disappear in the Hundred Mile Wilderness—the most remote stretch along the entire two-thousand mile Appalachian Trail—Maine game warden Mike Bowditch joins the search to find them. The police interview everyone they can find who came in contact with the college students and learn that the women were lovers who had been keeping their relationship secret from their Evangelical parents in Georgia. When two corpses are discovered—the bones picked clean by coyotes—rumors spread that the women were stalked and killed by the increasingly aggressive canines. Faced with a statewide panic, Maine’s governor places an emergency bounty on every dead coyote, and wildlife officials are tasked with collecting the carcasses. Despite some misgivings, Bowditch does his grisly job. But he finds his complacency challenged by his new girlfriend, the brilliant but volatile biologist Stacey Stevens, who insists coyotes merely scavenged the bodies after the women were murdered. When Stacey herself disappears on the outskirts of the Hundred Mile Wilderness, Bowditch realizes that locating her means he must also discover the truth behind what happened to the two hikers. Were the young women really killed by coyotes or, as Stacey insisted, were they murdered by the most dangerous animal in the North Woods?

In Paul Doiron's Widowmaker, When a mysterious woman in distress appears outside his home, Mike Bowditch has no clue she is about to blow his world apart. Amber Langstrom is beautiful, damaged, and hiding a secret with a link to his past.. She claims her son Adam is a wrongfully convicted sex offender who has vanished from a brutal work camp in the high timber around the Widowmaker Ski Resort. She also claims that Adam Langstrom is the illegitimate son of Jack Bowditch, Mike’s dead and diabolical father. He is the half-brother Mike never knew he had. After trying so hard to put his troubled past behind him, Mike is reluctant to revisit the wild country of his childhood and again confront his father’s history of violence. But Amber’s desperation and his own need to know the truth make it hard for him to refuse her pleas for help. In search of answers, Bowditch travels through a mountainous wilderness to a place hidden from the rest of the world, where the military guards a top-secret interrogation base, sexual predators live together in a backwoods colony, and self-styled vigilantes are willing to murder anyone they consider their enemies. Mike Bowditch must exorcise the demons of the past before the real-life demons of the present kill him first.

When Maine game warden Mike Bowditch is tasked with shooting wild boars that are tearing up the forest and farms in his district, he makes a horrific discovery—the body of a baby buried in a shallow grave. Even more disturbing: DNA tests link the infant to a young woman who has been missing and presumed dead after she disappeared from a group rafting trip four years earlier. As he assists the reopened investigation, Bowditch begins to suspect that some of his neighbors aren’t who they seem to be. When violence strikes close to home, he realizes that his unknown enemies will stop at nothing to keep their terrible secrets. Mike Bowditch has bucked the odds his whole career, but this time the intrepid warden may have finally followed his hunches one step too far.

In this Edgar Award-nominated short story in the Mike Bowditch mystery series from bestselling author Paul Doiron, Mike is drawn into the story of a gruesome case from his mentor Charley Steven’s past. Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch accompanies his old friend and mentor, retired bush pilot Charley Stevens, as he pays a visit to a mysterious woman, the widow of a Vietnam vet, living in isolation in the Maine wilderness. Many years earlier, she had called Charley, then a young game warden himself, for help. She claimed that her badly bleeding husband had been attacked by a rabid bat. But in the succeeding days, despite her husband's increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior, his wife resisted Charley's attempts to help, arousing his suspicions that more was going on than met the eye. Was the husband the victim of rabies, or was he suffering from post traumatic stress disorder? The situation finally erupted into horrific violence, leaving everyone involved deeply scarred. In the devastating finale to RABID, Charley reveals to Mike how he uncovered the awful truth about what actually happened in their home so many years before.

In Paul Doiron's Stay Hidden, a supposed hunting accident becomes a dangerously complicated murder investigation in this intricately-plotted new audiobook thriller featuring Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch. A woman has been shot to death by a deer hunter on an island off the coast of Maine. To newly promoted Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch, the case seems open and shut. But as soon as he arrives on remote Maquoit Island he discovers mysteries piling up one on top of the other. The hunter now claims he didn't fire the fatal shot and the ballistic evidence proves he's telling the truth. Bowditch begins to suspect the secretive community might be covering up the identity of whoever killed Ariel Evans. The controversial author was supposedly writing a book about the island's notorious hermit. So why are there no notes in her rented cottage? The biggest blow comes the next day when the weekly ferry arrives and off steps the dead woman herself. Ariel Evans is alive, well, and determined to solve her own "murder" even if it upsets Mike Bowditch's investigation and makes them both targets of an elusive killer who will do anything to conceal his crimes.

Enjoy “Backtrack”—an original, brand new, short story from Edgar Award finalist Paul Doiron, author of the bestselling Mike Bowditch series. When a visiting hunter goes missing in the middle of a snowstorm, a young Charley Stevens (later the mentor to game warden Mike Bowditch) sets off to rescue him—but begins to suspect the man may not want to be found.

In this thrilling entry in Edgar Award finalist Paul Doiron's bestselling series, the death of Maine's last wild wolf leads Game Warden Mike Bowditch to an even bigger criminal conspiracy. Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch already has a troubling mystery on his hands: finding the archer who mortally wounded Maine's only wild wolf. Then he learns his best friend, Billy Cronk, has been released from prison after heroically defending a female guard from a stabbing. Mike comes to believe the assault was orchestrated by a wider criminal conspiracy. When the conspirators pursue Billy's wife and children to a "safe" cabin in the woods, Mike rushes to their defense only to find himself outnumbered, outgunned—and maybe out of options.

In this original short story in the bestselling Mike Bowditch mystery series by Paul Doiron, Mike is confronted with a case of stolen identity. When the body of a young man is pulled from a submerged car in Roque Harbor, rookie game warden Mike Bowditch is shocked when the man’s driver’s license identifies him as none other than…Mike Bowditch. For weeks, Mike and his colleagues have been fielding reports of a man terrorizing the locals while posing as a game warden, wielding a plastic pin-on badge and claiming to be “Warden Bowditch”. Who is the imposter, and how did he end up dead in the bottom of a harbor? Mike must uncover the truth in order to clear his own name.

A sudden disappearance reveals a startling connection to a 15-year-old cold case in the new thriller from bestselling Edgar Award finalist Paul Doiron. “Never trust a man without secrets.” These are the last words retired game warden Charley Stevens speaks to his surrogate son, Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch, before the old man vanishes without explanation into a thousand miles of forest along the Canadian border. Mike suspects his friend’s sudden disappearance has to do with an antique badge found at a flea market—a badge that belonged to a warden who was presumed dead fifteen years ago but whose body was never recovered. On a mission to find Charley before he meets a similarly dark fate, Mike must reopen a cold case that powerful people, including his fellow wardens—one of whom might be a killer—will do anything to keep closed.

In "The Caretaker," an original short story from bestselling author Paul Doiron, Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch tracks down a sinister prowler turning a couple's dream vacation home into a nightmare. New owners of a dream cottage on a remote Maine lake find themselves taunted, then menaced by an unknown figure. When the local authorities refuse to help, they turn to retired Maine game warden Charley Stevens and his young protege Mike Bowditch for protection. But Charley begins to suspect there is more to the mystery than the couple is letting on—and if he and Mike don’t act fast, the situation will explode into violence.

Maine game warden Mike Bowditch finds himself in a life-or-death chase in this new thriller in the bestselling mystery series by Edgar Award nominee Paul Doiron. Maine game warden Mike Bowditch is fighting for his life. Ambushed on a darkened winter road, he plunges his Jeep into a frozen river and must escape drowning beneath the ice. Surviving the crash is only the first challenge he faces in a nightlong battle to stay alive and one step ahead of his unknown, heavily armed pursuers. To outwit them and return to his friends and family, none of whom knows where he is, Bowditch must dissect the hours leading up to the ambush and solve two riddles: who are these people who desperately want him dead and what has he done to incur their wrath?

In Skin and Bones, an original short story in the Paul Doiron's bestselling Mike Bowditch series, the killing of a bald eagle unearths ties to a tragic case from mentor Charley Steven’s past. When Maine game warden Mike Bowditch discovers a bullet-ridden bald eagle in the Maine woods, he is surprised by the memories it brings back for his mentor, retired warden pilot Charley Stevens. Decades earlier, Charley briefly teamed up with Mike’s father, the notorious poacher Jack Bowditch, on an unsettling case that has haunted Charley for years. The two enemies, both war veterans, found common cause over the senseless shooting of a magnificent eagle. But what started as a tentative alliance over a wildlife crime soon became something bigger and more an investigation into a missing young man whose physically abusive brother might well have finally killed him. When an unspeakable discovery led to an impossible choice, Charley and Jack were forced to decide how far they would go to find justice when faced with inhumanity taken to its extreme.

An eerie, windswept island off the coast of Maine becomes the site of a double murder and a disappearance in Hatchet Island, the next thriller in Paul Doiron's bestselling Mike Bowditch series. A call for help from a former colleague leads Maine game warden investigator Mike Bowditch and his girlfriend Stacey Stevens on a sea kayaking trip to a research station far off the coast. Stacey spent summers interning on the island, a sanctuary for endangered seabirds, and they are shocked by what they hear when they come ashore. The biologists are being threatened by local fishermen and stalked by a mysterious boatman who seems intent on trespassing on the refuge. Even worse, their leader, whose mind is slowly unraveling after the unexplained suicide of a young intern, has now gone missing. Camped on a nearby islet for the night, Mike and Stacey waken to the sound of a gunshot. When they return to the refuge at dawn, their darkest fears are confirmed: two of the three researchers have been brutally murdered and the third has disappeared, along with the island skiff. Mike’s quest to find the missing man reveals new suspects including a Marine Patrol officer with a history of violence and the sanctuary's enigmatic founder, who conveniently reappears after the killings. The search expands to a nearby island owned by a world-renowned photographer with a scandalous reputation. The artist and his equally brilliant wife wield a powerful hold over the inhabitants of their private kingdom, and Mike increasingly comes to believe that someone in the village knows more about the killings than they dare admit. With no one to trust and miles from shore, Mike Bowditch must stop a ruthless murderer determined to make sure a terrifying secret never sees the light of day.

In “Snakebit," an original short story from bestselling author Paul Doiron, Maine game warden Mike Bowditch must hunt down a killer who uses the unlikeliest of murder weapons: rattlesnakes. 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? Bowditch’s investigation leads him to a pair of eccentric married scientists who have a vested interest in rattlesnakes and their venom. Even more suspicious, their estranged daughter has accused them of carrying out grotesque experiments on her. As more rattlesnakes appear in the woods—and the case becomes increasingly mystifying—Bowditch finds himself running out of time to catch his exotic foe.

Game Warden Mike Bowditch's engagement party is interrupted by the discovery of a gruesome double murder in Dead Man's Wake, a new thriller from Edgar Award-winning author Paul Doiron. On the evening of their engagement party, Maine Game Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch and Stacey Stevens witness what seems to be a hit-and-run speedboat crash on a darkened lake. When they arrive at the scene, their spotlight reveals a gruesome sight: a severed arm beneath the surface. As day breaks, the warden dive team recovers not one but two naked corpses: the dismembered man and the married woman with whom he was having an affair. Mike begins to suspect the swimmers' deaths were not a senseless accident but a coldly calculated murder. Alone among his fellow officers, Mike begins to sense the involvement of a trained professional, smarter and more dangerous than any enemy he has faced. As Mike and Stacey get closer to identifying the killer, their own lives are suddenly put on the line, leading to a confrontation designed to silence them forever.

Game Warden Mike Bowditch must chase down a cunning and dangerous fugitive in the North Maine Woods in this nail\-biter of a thriller from Edgar Award\-nominated author Paul Doiron, Pitch Dark. Legendary bush pilot Josie Jonson can’t believe her luck when a skilled builder just happens to show up after she purchases land near Prentiss Pond. All Mark Redmond asks in return for building Josie’s dream cabin is that he be left alone to homeschool his 12\-year\-old daughter, Cady. For Maine game warden investigator Mike Bowditch, the intensity of Redmond's secretiveness is troubling, especially in light of suspicious criminal activity being reported around the area―including rumors of an armed man offering large sums of money in exchange for the location of Redmond and Cady. Josie, though hesitant to violate the trust of her prized builder, eventually agrees to fly Mike and his father\-in\-law Charley Stevens to the secluded pond in an attempt to protect Redmond and Cady. But hours after landing, the trip takes a dark turn when they witness a horrific murder and are taken captive themselves. Freeing himself, Mike is forced to set off through the impenetrable Maine forest towards Canada, alone and unarmed in pursuit of a mysterious fugitive. As he navigates a windblown landscape choked with deadfalls and blocked by swollen streams, he marvels at his enemy’s bush craft. The killer possesses skills surpassing his own, and Bowditch can't tell if he is the cat or the mouse in this dangerous game. Can Mike Bowditch stop his adversary in time to save the life of a young girl, or will he be forced to watch another innocent soul die?

Bestselling author and Edgar-Award finalist Paul Doiron knows Maine better than just about anyone, and in this series that follows Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, he proves it. Here together for the first time in one thrill-ride collection are the first three books in the critically acclaimed The Poacher's Son Set in the wilds of Maine, this is an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive-his own father. Trespasser On a fog shrouded road in Maine, a young woman disappears after hitting a deer with her car. When Bowditch is called to investigate, he uncovers a web of lies and deceit that leads to a killer who may have already gotten away with murder. Bad Little Falls Doiron delivers another "masterpiece of high-octane narrative" (Booklist) in this harrowing thriller about the hunt for a murderer at the height of a major snowstorm.