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Widowmaker By Paul Doiron Minotaur, 320 pages, $36.99

The seventh book in Paul Doiron’s spirited series about the Maine game warden Mike Bowditch is so loosey-goosey in narrative and emotion that it seems Doiron never figured out what the book is really supposed to be about. This turns out not necessarily to be a drawback to

Widowmaker’s pleasures. Fans of the series are already well-acquainted with Bowditch’s strengths as a game warden (a fiendish dedication to the job, boundless energy) and his weaknesses (refusal to play by the game warden’s rules, readiness to shoot off his mouth when silence would be a better strategy).

At the beginning of the story, Bowditch is dragged into his past. Bowditch’s late father, Jack Bowditch, was Maine’s most notorious poacher and, near the end of his life, a murderer. A woman who seeks out Mike Bowditch in the present claims she was his father’s girlfriend and the mother of a son by Jack. The son, Mike’s half-brother, is currently missing and in trouble. The woman begs Mike to find and rescue the poor guy.

This would seem to be the book’s major plot point, but mostly it fades into the background while Mike Bowditch engages in a long series of typically complex and dangerous pieces of gamewarden duty.

It’s unfailingly entertaining material and even if events often grow chaotic, it’s good to spend time in the ever-valiant Bowditch’s company.

The Other Side of Silence By Philip Kerr Putnam, 416 pages, $35

It’s the summer of 1956, and someone is blackmailing W. Somerset Maugham. Who does Maugham turn to for help? To Bernie Gunther of course. This is Philip Kerr’s 11th book in the series featuring Bernie, once a German soldier, a PoW in a Russian gulag, a Berlin cop and private eye, now, at 60 years old, the concierge at the lavish Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat just down the French Riviera road from Maugham’s even more sumptuous Villa Mauresque. The blackmail involves a tangled mess of Maugham’s gay friends in high places, prominent Brits who spied for Russia, dodgy MI5 operatives and treacherous Nazis. Kerr’s storytelling grows occasionally windy, but the plot remains appealing, particularly when the reader isn’t sure which part of the book is true and which is Kerr’s concoction.

Seven Days Dead By John Farrow Minotaur, 298 pages, $36.99

Grand Manan Island is a wild spot in the Bay of Fundy populated by rustic oddballs and isolated country hicks. John Farrow (the pen name adopted by the prizewinning Canadian novelist Trevor Ferguson when he turns to the crime genre) sets his new book featuring retired Montreal police detective Emile Cinq-Mars on Manan, where Cinq-Mars thinks he’s on holiday. But when the richest and most odious island resident is murdered, Cinq-Mars is roped into sleuthing duties.

As usual in the series, all characters emerge as beautifully realized people — not always likeable, but as intriguing as the nutty island they call home.

Invisible Dead By Sam Wiebe Random House, 336 pages, $24.95

Dave Wakeland, the Vancouver PI, has all the right stuff for a guy in his profession: a nice line of wisecracks, a high pain threshold. But he also radiates a winning sense of wistfulness. Traditional private investigators such as Sam Spade win our respect. Dave Wakeland gets our affection.

In the new book, the second in the Wakeland series, Dave is hired to track a woman who was lost to Vancouver’s tenderloin (slang for “underworld”) 11 years earlier.

The search runs on competing tracks rather than the single track conventional to most PI novels.

The result is a story as appealing as it is mysterious.