One of the nice things about having a new book coming out is that you know, more or less, what to expect. Reviews will begin appearing a few months before the publication date. Your editor will email you about foreign rights sales (you hope). Your publicist will volunteer you to write a blog post on a mystery web site.
What you don't know, however, is when these things will happen.
So I had the experience of waking up this morning to the pleasant surprise of a review for Trespasser in the new Publishers Weekly:
In Doiron's compelling sequel to his debut, The Poacher's Son, troubled 25-year-old Mike Bowditch, a Maine game warden, is still coming to grips with the realization that his estranged father--now deceased--has become known as the state's most notorious murderer. Bowditch finds solace in his job, but when he investigates a car accident involving a deer on a remote stretch of road, the driver, 23-year-old Ashley Kim, from Cambridge, Mass., has disappeared. Later, in an empty house, he finds Kim's naked body, bound with sailor's rigging tape, with the word slut carved into her chest. As Bowditch becomes increasingly obsessed with finding the killer, he puts his already tenuous career in jeopardy as well as his equally tenuous relationship with his possibly pregnant girlfriend. Doiron complements this thriller's decidedly dark tone with introspective existential and spiritual musings and atmospheric imagery (houses in a fishing village "clung like barnacles" around a harbor).
It's always interesting to see what the reviewer fixates on: the atmosphere, the existential musings. "Decidedly dark?" Yes, I guess it is.