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Mike Bowditch is an excellent game warden, but his feckless nature and self-destructive impulses have caused a lot of trouble for him in his professional life. He has butted heads with his superiors and often seemed arrogant and contentious. As a result, he has been banished to a remote wilderness area on the Canadian border of Maine; and it's the dead of winter. Fortunately, Mike has acknowledged his flaws and has been working hard to temper his self-destructive nature. He isn't always successful, but he's made major strides in becoming more responsible and less obnoxious. When a half-frozen man appears at the home of a local couple, who are terrified by their visitor, Mike has just had dinner with a local vet whom he calls upon to look at the frostbitten man, Prester Sewall. Accompanied by a local professor who is a wilderness expert, they soon find the man's companion dead in the in the local wasteland called the Heath. What would cause these two men to be out in a blizzard that may be the storm of the century? Could they be selling drugs? Things become even more complicated when Bowditch becomes involved with Prester's sister and her strange young son, Lucas. He tries to protect them, but he is facing his own difficulties. Someone is determined to make his life miserable—letting a skunk loose in Mike's rented home, for example. BAD LITTLE FALLS is the third book in the Bowditch series and delivers on the promise shown in the first, THE POACHER'S SON. The setting is wonderfully rendered, the prose beautifully descriptive, and the characterization top notch. The development of the character of the boy, Lucas, was compelling. But none of the other characters are ever able to outshine Mike Bowditch. Watching him battle his own personal demons is almost as interesting as following his progress on the investigation. I was quite disappointed in the second book in this series, TRESPASSER, because there was almost nothing about Mike's game warden job and the fact that Mike was so unwilling to control his own base impulses. I am happy to report that Doiron has addressed both those flaws, and the result is an excellent book that I thoroughly enjoyed and one that has me anxious to see what happens next. § Formerly a training development manager for a large company, Maddy is now retired and continues to enable the addiction of crime fiction fans as owner of the online discussion group, 4 Mystery Addicts(4MA), while avidly reading in every possible free moment herself.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, September 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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