The Imposter

Mike Bowditch #14
The Imposter (2020)

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The Imposter is a Mike Bowditch short story rather than a full-length novel, and its premise starts with one of the most unsettling hooks in the series’ shorter fiction. When the body of a young man is recovered from a submerged car in Roque Harbor, rookie Maine game warden Mike Bowditch is stunned to find that the victim’s driver’s license identifies him as Mike Bowditch. That discovery turns the case into a stolen-identity mystery with an immediate personal edge, even though the dead man is clearly someone else.

What makes the premise so effective is its compact strangeness. Paul Doiron uses the false identity not just as a puzzle, but as a way to unsettle Mike’s sense of his own place in the world, especially in the early part of his career when he is still finding his footing as a game warden. Instead of building toward the broader scale of a full Bowditch novel, the story leans into a tighter, more concentrated form of suspense, where the mystery grows out of one disturbing discovery and the question of who the dead man really was.

As a series interlude, The Imposter works best as a sharp, fast character piece that adds texture to Mike’s early years. It does not function as a major standalone installment in the same way as the main novels, but it fits neatly into the larger Bowditch world as a brief, eerie investigation built around identity, deception, and the unnerving feeling of seeing your own name attached to someone else’s death. Paul Doiron has also clarified elsewhere that stories like The Imposter are short works, not full novels, which is useful given how often they get listed alongside the main books.