The Bone Orchard
In the fifth book in the Mike Bowditch series, the Maine game warden has resigned his position following a family tragedy 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 an official inquiry and outrage from the the dead soldier's platoon mates. When the sergeant is shot outside her farmhouse, Mike joins the hunt to find the sniper 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 apple orchards and 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.
Paul Doiron
In the shadowed woods of Maine, where the silence is broken only by the crack of branches and the distant call of a loon, Paul Doiron found the pulse of his fiction. His novels don’t just flirt with danger—they move through it deliberately, guided by the steady instincts of a man who knows the land as intimately as he knows the people who live on its edges.
Doiron is the author behind the critically acclaimed Mike Bowditch crime series, which has quietly become a mainstay for readers who crave mystery grounded in reality. His protagonist, a game warden with a haunted past and a dogged moral compass, investigates crimes not from behind a desk, but on foot, in forests where cell service fades and the terrain offers no second chances. This immersive backdrop—the Maine wilderness—is not a setting in Doiron’s books. It’s the soul of them.
Mike Bowditch
In the dense, whispering woods of Maine, justice isn’t handed down in courtrooms—it’s hunted, tracked, and sometimes lost to the wild. That’s the world readers step into with the Mike Bowditch series, a brooding, atmospheric journey through crimes that are as tangled and unforgiving as the forests they’re born in.
Mike Bowditch consists of sixteen primary books, and includes eight additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
