Slow to get underway but the payoff is worth the wait.
A distress call takes Game Warden Mike Bowditch to a part of Maine he rarely sees: the tiny, rugged islands off the coast.
Kendra Ballard, project manager for the Maine Seabird Initiative, is seriously worried about the Initiative’s future. It’s come under pressure from local fishers whose attitude toward nature is unapologetically different from hers, and Kendra’s particularly worried about her boss, Dr. Maeve McLeary. So she asks her old college roommate, bush pilot/biologist/EMT/kayaking guide Stacey Stevens, if she’ll come out to visit and bring Mike, the lover with whom she’s recently been reunited after two years—and she also asks if Mike will please bring his gun. Mike and Stacey’s initial inquiries confirm Kendra’s suspicions that there’s trouble brewing in the place to which famed photographer Clay Markham has retired and that Maeve is indeed seriously disturbed. Apart from Kendra’s story about intern Evan Levandowski’s suicide and Mike’s unsettling confrontation with surly lobsterman Bear Goodale and his mate Chris Beckwith, however, it’s hard to put a finger on the source of the troubles. After an attack on a camp they’ve pitched on an island rumored to be littered with unexploded bombs leaves Kendra and one of her current interns dead and obscenely posed and the other intern missing, it’s no more clear who led the assault or why. Only the suicide of Maeve herself begins to bring the mystery into focus. Before it’s solved, Mike will have to call on every one of Stacey’s impressive list of skills and practice a couple he didn’t know he had himself.
Slow to get underway but the payoff is worth the wait.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-25023-513-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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