Shades of the 40’s movie-noir LAURA, Stay Hidden is a modern day who-dunnit from author Paul Doiron.

Set on the isolated Maine island of Maquoit, where the residents are distrustful, set in their ways, and every single one is a suspect, STAY HIDDEN features Game Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch as the primary investigator of what every resident on the island says is a standard hunting accident, but proves to be something much more.

Called to Maquoit after a woman is shot and killed during deer hunting season, the pieces of her death don’t add up to a simple accident. The woman, an investigative reported named Ariel Evans, was supposedly writing a new book, but Bowditch finds no computer in her rental house, or anything else depicting a writer’s life. What he does find are dozens of drawings of the island’s supposed hermit.

It doesn’t take him long to discover that the murdered woman was a drug addict, having an illicit affair with one of the island residents, and that the population as a whole disliked her.

They day after he arrives, a woman gets off the island ferry who is a dead ringer for the murdered woman, and this is why I likened the book to LAURA. This is the real Ariel Evans. The woman murdered was her sister, MIranda. Just like in that famous film-noir, the wrong woman was murdered.

Or was she?

Did someone kill Miranda thinking it was her famous sister because of a grudge against Ariel? Bowditch isn’t sure, but the more questions he asks of the island inhabitants, the more he is convinced Miranda was murdered intentionally.

This was the first book I’ve read by Doiron. The character of Mike Bowditch is a recurring one, and although I haven’t read any of the previous in the series, there were enough crumbs of backstory built into this one that I felt as if I was caught up on the world the author has created.

A little long on exposition and island descriptions for my taste ( But that’s me and nothing negative about the book itself) this story was face paced and intriguing. The ending was satisfying and well plotted out.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for allowing me to read an ARC of this work.

This is the ninth book in Doiron’s crime series featuring Maine former game warden and now newly promoted warden investigator Mike Bowditch. (In Maine, game wardens are full law-enforcement officers, with all the powers of state troopers: “They are the ‘off-road police.’” Warden investigators are “for all intents and purposes a plainclothes detective.”)

Mike has been a game warden for six years but a warden investigator for only four months when he is assigned his first hunting homicide. A woman, Ariel Evans, staying out on the island of Maquoit off the coast of Maine, was shot, allegedy mistaken for a deer. But as Mike explains, “accident is not a term we use in the in the Maine Warden Service. Game wardens understand that even when guns misfire or bullets ricochet, when feet stumble or fingers slip, there is always a trail of causation you can follow that will lead you back to an act of culpable negligence.”

Mike is flown over to the island by his old friend, Charley Stevens (retired patrol warden who still volunteered the use of his plane when the other planes in the warden Aviation Division were otherwise engaged). He and Charley have been estranged since Mike’s relationship with Charley’s daughter Stacey ended back in the summer, after Stacey left to start a new life in Florida. Mike was perhaps more upset by the loss of his friendship with Charley: “Nothing on earth could have made me sadder. Charley Stevens was the closest thing I had ever had to a real father.”

The woman killed, Ariel Evans, 37, was a famous journalist from Manhattan renting a house on the island, possibly to work on another exposé. Her previous book had been a best-selling exposé of neo-Nazis, of which there were a few in Maquoit. Maquoit, a fictional island twenty miles off the coast of Maine resembling a bit the actual island of Monhegan, Maine, has a population of eighty-nine people.

Maquoit is accessible only by boat or plane, and has primarily served as a lobster fishing community. But as Charley explains, “All these old fishing outposts are dying off as the groundfish disappear and the oceans warm up. Lobsters are moving north in the Gulf of Maine. Give it a few years and Maquoit will go dead in the offseason, too.”

Doiron routinely fills readers in on many details about the flora and fauna of Maine, incorporating a lot of background on Maine seamlessly into his stories. In this book he has Mike observe:

“Lobsters are cannibals. Leave them together in a tank without rubber bands around their claws, and they will dismember and devour each other in short order. Drop a bunch of lobstermen together on an island - Maquoit, for instance, twenty miles off the Maine coast - and they begin to resemble the cold-blooded creatures they catch.”

He heard from the residents that violent feuds occurred between the lobstermen. In addition, drug use was high in Maine’s fishing communities.

To add to their troubles, the island was overrun by deer. As Stacey, a wildlife biologist, told Mike at one point, the prime carrying capacity for a place like the island would be ten deer per square mile. The current estimate for Maquoit, based on their most recent survey, was seventy deer per square mile.” The deer on the island were starving, and most of them were infested with Lyme-disease-carrying ticks. But the islanders didn’t want to give them up.

When Ariel was found dead, no one confessed to the shooting, but in spite of the small population on the island, there were plenty of suspects. None of the townspeople wanted to talk however. Mike was an outsider. Plus, he could leave; the rest had to stay there.

As Mike goes around questioning people, he uncovers more and more layers to the puzzle. Finally, his own life becomes in danger.

Evaluation: I always love learning more about Maine from Doiron’s books. This one has more character development than suspense, as opposed to previous books, but with no less enjoyment for the reader. I always look forward to more stories in the series.

Mike Bowditch returns in the 9th story of his adventures as a Warden in Maine. The setting is a small island community isolated from "America" and where only the hardy survive. Mike is called with a bare bones team to investigate a hunting incident - a death on the island thought to be caused by a deer hunter's stray bullet. The islanders do not trust outsiders so Mike must work hard to discover the truth. An extra challenge (not counting the bad weather) is that a woman arrives via the ferry claiming she is Ariel Evans, the dead woman's name. Now he must figure out the dead woman's identity and who would want her dead. As Mike and Ariel search for clues the killer searches for opportunity to kill them both.

Nothing is better on a snowy Saturday then a good cup of coffee and the latest addition to the Mike Bowditch series. This time Mike finds himself on an isolated Maine island investigating his first case as a Warden Investigator. Fighting doubts about his own abilities Mike finds himself confronted by mistaken identity, Neo-nazis, a mysterious hermit, more twists and turns then a mountain road and or yes, fog. Lots of fog. An atmospheric thriller of the best kind.

Mark this one down. Highly recommended!