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Mike Bowditch has wanted to be a game warden since he was a boy. His mother left his father – a combat-damaged former US Ranger, another of Vietnam's many victims, an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a poacher – but Mike never lost the one positive thing he got from his failure of a father, his love of the woods. When a sheriff's deputy and a prominent land developer are killed after a stormy meeting at a backwoods township, Jack Bowditch is named main suspect – and simply disappears into the forest and swamps of one of New England's last wilderness areas. Mike, still unsure of his own personality and trying to prove himself as much to himself as to his feckless father, is certain Jack is not a killer and risks his job, his on-off relationship and even his own life to prove his innocence. The human story as he takes on the doubts of the backwoods community, his own colleagues and a sceptical detective is well conceived and cleverly narrated, suspenseful and gripping, with dramatic twists and turns. But it is the wilderness itself and its animal inhabitants that are the real stars of this book. Doiron is a registered Maine guide and his love of one of the few remaining unspoiled stretches of north east America is almost palpable and his wonderfully evocative descriptions drag you into the tangle of bogs, giant trees and dense undergrowth that frame Mike's working life. You feel his character's anger at the heartless developers, constantly buying up land for exclusive developments for the rich and threatening to end a way of life that has existed for generations. Doiron combines a love story with his pain at the state's shrinking wilderness with a study of a son struggling to love and be loved by his father, and in the process provides a gripping murder mystery. THE POACHER'S SON has already won awards in America and should collect plenty more. §John Cleal is a former soldier and journalist with an interest in medieval history. He divides his time between France and England.
Reviewed by John Cleal, August 2013
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