Widowmaker is the seventh book in Paul Doiron’s series centered on Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch. This series is a good one, so I recommend starting it from the beginning rather than trying to pick it up with Widowmaker. I think it can be done, as Doiron gives brief synopses of any information that might be needed from earlier books. To have the best comprehension of the characters, though, I believe you should have read the other books in the series before this one.

Widowmaker finds Mike Bowditch making a trip back up to northwestern Maine, where his late father once lived. He was visited by a woman named Amber Langstrom, who claims her son, Adam, is Mike’s half-brother and he’s in trouble. Apparently, he was convicted of having a sexual relationship with a minor when he was 18 and she was 15. He was working at a logging camp that specifically hires sex offenders when he disappeared.

Mike isn’t sure he believes Amber at first, but the thought that he might have another family member nags at him. He travels up to the Widowmaker ski resort where Amber works, and begins poking around to see what he can find out.

The main issue at the center of the story is what to do with sex offenders once they’ve served their time. Adam was attending a local boarding school on a scholarship, so he was the “poor townie” to the more wealthy and connected family his former girlfriend was a part of. Adam was good friends with her brother as well, but once their parents found out he was sleeping with their daughter, they wanted him prosecuted. It’s a different situation than someone who actually commits assault and rape, yet the law doesn’t differentiate between them. All of them go on the sexual predator list, which restricts where they can live and what places will hire them.

Mike knows Adam was wrong, but also questions if the punishment fits the crime. His attempts to talk with the last people who saw Adam alive at the logging camp are thwarted by the owner of the logging company. He seems to be giving men who have no other job prospects a place to work and live. In actuality, he’s exploiting the fact that there are very few options for them and wants to keep what he’s doing hidden.

The book is written in the usual style of how Mike Bowditch investigates. He kind of just keeps poking and prodding until things are revealed. In this case, it’s an issue not just of the logging camp, but also how the new owners are managing the Widowmaker ski resort. That far away from major cities, things are a little looser in regard to how things are monitored, which may or may not be behind a tragic accident at the resort years before, which involved Mike’s father. This is also part of what he’s dealing with during the investigation.

Doiron’s writing is terrific. I love how he describes Maine. Having been all over the state myself, I can see the beauty of this section of western Maine in addition to the isolation it offers. This is especially true in the winter when snowstorms can cut the population off from the rest of the state. There’s a beauty to the snow and the landscape it enhances that can be hard for some to appreciate. It also takes a certain type of person to be able to deal with the isolation in rural living.

The audiobook is narrated by Henry Levya, who does a decent job. I liked that he didn’t try too hard to infuse the characters with Maine (New England) accents because narrators usually annoy me when they do that. There’s a tendency to exaggerate the features of regional accents that sound so false to people who come from there. Levya was easy to listen to on what could be a difficult subject.

I haven’t found a book by Paul Doiron yet that I didn’t like, and Widowmaker came in at five stars for me. He does a great job challenging Mike to think more about his family and background and what responsibility he might have to a half-brother, if Adam is his father’s son. Yet Mike is still the Mike I know from earlier books in the series and behaves in the way I expect him to. The book gripped me until the very end.

It also prominently features Shadow, the wolf-dog mix, which is another plus!

Previous book in the series: