I also reveal for the first time the covers my British publisher, Constable & Robinson, wil be using when they launch the Mike Bowditch series in the UK in 2013. 

In 2011 Maine wardens spent:

• 30.1 percent of their time on hunting, trapping, and wildlife enforcement
• 20.9 percent on fishing enforcement
• 13.8 percent watercraft enforcement
• 10 percent administration
• 7.2 percent ATV enforcement
• 6.2 percent snowmobile enforcement
• 3.7 percent search and rescue
• 3.3 percent training
• 1.6 percent general law enforcement
• 1.3 percent wildlife/human conflicts
• 1.1 percent assisting other agencies
• .8 percent aviation

To me the big suprise was how little time the Warden Service spent on search and rescue, considering the amount of media coverage it gets in the state of Maine. Then again, one has to admit that "administration" doesn't make for gripping TV news segments.

I was a little older than the character—enough to have some perspective on the identity issues he was wrestling with—but not of an entirely different generation. It took me a while to write The Poacher's Son, however, and a while longer to get it published, and one of the results was that I aged faster than Mike. Three books into the series, he is still in his mid twenties while I am now in my mid forties. 

Maybe I'm rationalizing this, but I've come to see the age gap in my fiction as a positive. Most Millenials grew up wired at birth, and so Mike's decision to pursue what he calls "an old-fashioned profession" as a game warden and his rejection of texting and other aspects of the Information Age have become even more defining character traits for him.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the website 20SomethingReads asked twenty mystery authors to talk briefly about our work and recommend books we thought would speak to readers in their twenties. I like how the writer of the feature characterized me:

Paul Doiron, author of BAD LITTLE FALLS, shares books about people who  live their lives a bit off the beaten track, but carry within them a lot of soul.

Anyway, here are my recommendations. Frankly, I think you should read these books whatever your age is.

Here's a screen grab. To use the interactive map, click here.

The action of my second novel, Trespasser, takes place in this week of the year, and the recent weather made me rememeber something I wrote about the season:

Late March. Mud season in Maine. Not yet springtime but no longer winter either—a slippery, seasonal limbo. Weather even more freakish than usual. Rain, snow, ice, and sun, all within the span of an hour. A meteorologist's worst nightmare.

The only constant is mud. Mud creeping up your boots, splattering your pant legs, finding its way onto clothes you never even wear outdoors. Your fingernails jammed black with it. The impossibility of ever feeling clean. The inside of your truck transformed each day into a pigpen. Mud splashed onto the windshield, then smeared back and forth by the wipers. The wheels gummed up with mire and packed with gravel into the axles. Every car on the road painted the same shit brown.

Wherever you look a mottled, melting landscape. Snow banks rotting along the roadsides and melt-water streams the color of urine. Everything that was hidden is now exposed. Beer cans, trash bags, emptied ashtrays. Fur and feathers from creatures unidentifiable, things long dead.

Winter's aftermath. The dirtiest season.

Freakish, indeed.

PS. The paperback for Trespasser hits stores on April 10.