Book Review: Stay Hidden

Paul Doiron has a flair for atmospherics. That much was very evident when I read The Precipice more than two years ago. In the time since then, Doiron's protagonist Mike Bowditch has gotten himself promoted from the position of game warden to a warden investigator. He has also broken up with his longtime girlfriend Stacey even if it's evident he isn't completely over her. Stay Hidden, the ninth book in the series, kicks off when Mike is called on to investigate what appears to be a hunting accident incident in the remote island of Marquoit off the coast of Maine - a controversial author by the name of Ariel Winters (a Columbia Journalism School alum, no less!), who seems to have been at the receiving end of a bullet as the result of a hunter mistaking her for a deer. For Mike, the situation appears to be straightforward. An open and shut case, only to realise it's more knotty as he begins to investigate the events leading up to the "incident" and to the utter shock of everyone, the dead woman herself shows up on the shore alive in flesh and blood. Smart, intriguing and packed with twists and turns, Paul Doiron executes a gloomy thriller that's by turns a devastating portrait of a community coping with an ecological menace and a riveting page-turner.