Paul Doiron

Minotaur Books

This is Doiron's third mystery starring Maine game warden Mike Bowditch - although it's the first I've read. (No question, though, that I'll backtrack, "Memento"-style, and read the first two.) This time out, Bowditch has presumably irritated someone because he's been exiled to far north Maine in the dead of winter - and Doiron, editor in chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, writes such sensationally evocative descriptons of the weather that you'd best wear Gore-Tex gear as you read. Meanwhile, Bowditch finds a frozen dead man in a blizzard. The dude's a notorious drug dealer, and it turns out he was murdered. By whom and why, though? In his new part of Maine, Bowditch will find no shortage of candidates - not a few of whom would just as soon he wasn't around to begin with.

- RICK KOSTER