“Readers might shudder”

Severe storms have left large parts of northern Maine impassable. Streams and rivers are overflowing their banks and logging roads and trails are riddled with fallen trees. This is no time to explore or hunt, so why did a heavily armed stranger rent an all-terrain vehicle and disappear into the wilderness?

Gamekeeper Mike Bowditch thinks he has a missing person case on his hands, but when he finds out that the stranger has offered large sums of cash for information about the whereabouts of a man calling himself Mark Redmond, he senses bigger trouble.

This is how “Pitch Dark” begins, the 15th book in Paul Doiron’s great crime series featuring Bowditch.

As it turns out, Redmond is at a remote lakeside camp with his 12-year-old daughter. A skilled builder, he is building a log cabin for a legendary bush pilot named Josie Jonson, a friend of Bowditch’s wife. Bowditch convinces Josie to pick him up in her helicopter and fly him there, both to search for the missing stranger and to warn Redmond that he may be in danger.

When Bowditch delivers the warning, however, Redmond shows neither surprise nor concern. Instead, he serves Bowditch and Josie drugged coffee, takes away their weapons and communications devices, destroys the helicopter’s controls, and disappears into the forest with his daughter.

When Bowditch regains consciousness, he finds that Josie has choked on her own vomit, making Redmond the murderer. With no weapon, no vehicle, and no way to call for help, Bowditch sets out to find him anyway, determined to hunt down the killer before he can escape to Canada.

Pursuing a villain through the wilderness is something of a standard for crime writers who set their stories in America’s last wilderness areas. Good crime writers have written, for example, CJ Box and William Kent Krueger, whose books are set in Wyoming and Minnesota respectively.

However, it would be difficult to find a more exciting novel or one with more surprising twists than Pitch Dark. As always, Doiron’s characters are well drawn and his cold, rain-soaked setting is so vividly portrayed that it sends chills down readers’ spines.

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