One Last Lie is the eleventh in the Mike Bowditch series by Paul Doiron. Mike is a Maine game warden but this book starts in Florida where Mike has been sent to perform his due diligence on the background for a new chief pilot for the Maine Warden Service.Mike’s friend, Charley Stevens, told him, “Never trust a man without secrets.” This is one of Doiron’s promises to the reader. He promises that he will tell us what the lie in the title means.He promises that he will tell us why Mike is in Florida and not Maine, and who the person might be that doesn’t have secrets. That’s a lot of promises before the reader makes it through the first paragraph.
Doiron is a solid storyteller and his books are a pleasure to read, and Mike is a wonderfully imperfect protagonist. Doiron follows through on those early promises and makes and answers a bunch more along the way. Mike seeks to find his friend and mentor, Charley, who has mysteriously professed to disappearing forever, leaving a note which in itself is mysterious.
There are some great lines like, "Florida is the world capital of unintended consequences”. And “My love for the old man was close to unconditional. But this day signaled the end of my apprenticeship. I had no doubt that Charley Stevens would continue to teach me life lessons, but only small boys and fools worship other men. The point of life is to find heroism in yourself.”
There are some great action scenes like in the Florida swamp wrestling with a gigantic python. Doiron puts Mike on an island in a rushing river where there seems to be no way out. Threats all around - to him, to his friend Charley, to a partially innocent bystander with an evil, Dudley Do-right character changing his skin from good guy to villain. Nature plays a role - as it should in the wilds of the Maine woods.
This is not a major Don Quixote fable, but it is a solid backwoods yarn. Mike does have problems with his girlfriends, and it seems that Doiron is undecided about which way to go with that issue. It reminds me of the Lovin’ Spoonful song Did you ever have to make up your mind? Say yes to one and leave the other behind. Mike finally ends the story by lying to himself. And that is the last lie.
I used to think that all my old house lacked was a magnificent view - the ever changing light on a mountain range, an ocean vista with waves the color of steel, or a raging river torrent, cascading over rocks. But beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Sitting at my desk as I write, looking straight ahead, I have a view partially blocked by a large computer monitor. I can only see about a thirty inch by thirty inches of the window looking to the west. The sun rises every day on the other side of the house so what I see is the pointy gable of the house across the street and branches of the trees closely clustered behind it. And as the sun rises it paints those surfaces with distractingly awesome colors. And some mornings the moon sets through the trees, dripping down the side of the house across the street. And then I get further distracted by the ripples in the old glass. Someone once told me that those ripples were caused by the glass aging, moving ever downward as a sort of liquid. But that's not true, says Michael Cima, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Faculty Director of the MIT Glass Lab. Contrary to the urban legend that glass is a slow-moving liquid, it’s actually a highly resilient elastic solid, which means that it is completely stable. So those ripples, warps, and bull’s eye indentations in really old pieces of glass “were created when the glass was created,” Cima says. They are the result of old-fashioned glass fabrication methods, not aging. (MIT School of Engineering)
