Snakebit

Mike Bowditch #20
Snakebit (2023)

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Snakebit is a Mike Bowditch short story rather than a full-length novel, and its central hook is one of the strangest in the series: Maine game warden Mike Bowditch has to track a killer using rattlesnakes as a murder weapon. The case begins when a teenager arrives at a Maine hospital with a rattlesnake bite, an alarming detail because rattlesnakes are understood to have been gone from that region for more than a century. That single impossibility gives the story its momentum, pushing Mike into an investigation that quickly feels less like a wildlife mystery and more like something deliberately engineered.

As Mike digs further, the trail leads to an eccentric married pair of scientists with a professional interest in rattlesnakes and venom, while their estranged daughter adds another layer of suspicion by accusing them of grotesque experiments. That setup gives Paul Doiron a compact but vivid suspense framework: part natural-world mystery, part murder puzzle, and part clash between scientific obsession and moral danger.

As a series interlude, Snakebit works best as a sharp, self-contained Bowditch case with an unusually offbeat premise. It keeps the familiar Maine setting and Mike’s investigative instincts, but in a shorter form that leans more on the eerie improbability of the setup than on the wider emotional scale of the main novels. It is also explicitly presented as a short story in the Mike Bowditch world, later included among Doiron’s collected short fiction.