Early on in the Mike Bowditch novels, I realized I was writing an unconventional mystery series. The books weren’t episodes in Mike’s crime-solving career so much as steps forward—and sometimes backward—in his personal and professional development as a hero. I often say that I’m writing the autobiography of a Maine game warden.
Seen that way, I’ve been moving toward STORM TIDE from the beginning. This novel spans four seasons in Mike’s life, as a criminal case slowly and ominously takes shape just as he is turning thirty-four and on the brink of becoming a father himself. He is no longer the troubled, impetuous young man he was in THE POACHER’S SON—and yet, at the start of the book, he finds himself where he began, back on patrol in the Maine woods, with the accumulated weight of everything that has come before.
STORM TIDE is a story about consequences—about what happens when cases are closed, but questions remain. The novel is built around a series of violent deaths that force Mike to confront decisions from earlier in his career, moments when the law produced an outcome, but not necessarily justice. As those unresolved choices resurface, the consequences begin to accumulate, unfolding over the course of a year in which everything else in his life is also changing. The investigation asks whether it’s possible to move forward without first accounting for what was left unfinished, and what it costs to believe that time alone can settle moral debt.
I wrote this book slowly, with an awareness that Mike was no longer the young man he once was—and that neither, in some ways, was I. That perspective shaped every choice I made on the page. My hope is that readers who have followed Mike's journey will recognize how far he's come—and how far he has to go—and that new readers will discover a character worth getting to know.
