KNIFE CREEK is book eight in the Mike Bowditch series and together with his girlfriend Stacey, Mike is tasked with shooting some wild boars that are tearing up the forest and the farms. But, they make an awful discovery, the body of a baby has been buried in a shallow grave, left for the pigs to find and eat. If Mike and Stacey hadn't unearthed the grave nothing would have been left to find after the pigs had been done. It gets even stranger when the DNA links the baby to a young woman that disappeared four years earlier while rafting with some friends. Everyone now thinks she is dead, but apparently, she must have survived. What happened to her?

I have been curious about reading this series for a while now and getting this book felt like a good way to see if the series is anything for me. And I'm happy to say that this book left me with a want for more. Game warden Mike Bowditch and his biologist girlfriend Stacey are easy to like. And, I also came to like former game warden Dani, who now works for the state police. Of course, there is a lot of history, past events that are mentioned in this book, but it was never a hard book to get into, despite the fact that I have never read any of the previous books. Vice versa, it just made me more curious to find and read the books from the beginning.

The case is mysterious, tragic and thrilling to read about. Just finding the little body is so tragic, however, that is just the start to a bigger mystery. What happened to the young woman who disappeared, is she still alive? Has someone kept her alive for four years? Mike can't help trying to figure it out, despite it not really being his job, but there are some people living around the place the baby was found, people that are acting strange...

KNIFE CREEK is just my kind of book. Paul Doiron has written a great thriller, and I'm very glad to have read the book and I'm looking forward to both reading the next in the series, and also reading the previous books, to get to know Mike better.

Book Summary

When Maine game warden Mike Bowditch is tasked with shooting invasive feral hogs that are tearing up the forest in his district, he makes a horrific discovery — a dead baby buried in a shallow grave.

Even more disturbing: evidence suggests the infant was the child of a young woman who was presumed to have died four years earlier after she disappeared from a group rafting trip.

As Bowditch assists the reopened investigation, he begins to suspect that some of his neighbors aren’t who they seem to be. When violence strikes close to home, he realizes that his unknown enemies will stop at nothing to keep their terrible secrets.

Mike Bowditch has bucked the odds his whole career, but this time the intrepid warden may have finally followed his hunches one step too far.