Featured Excerpt: "Blaze Orange" by Paul Doiron -- Login / Register Search for: -- Search for: Read Excerpts Reviews Author Spotlight Essays Interviews Book Listicles On-Screen Television Film Trailers Cooking the Books Newsletter Login / Register Featured Excerpt: “Blaze Orange” by Paul Doiron By Crime HQ April 27, 2026 In “Blaze Orange,” an original short story by bestselling author Paul Doiron, Maine game warden Charley Stevens suspects that a tragic hunting accident is really cold-blooded murder—if only he can prove it. Enjoy an excerpt below and download the short story for just $1.99 at the eBook retailer of your choice! Kathy Frost was lifting weights in her basement when the dog started barking. Sadie could foretell visitors with uncanny precision. She never barked for strangers the same way she barked for friends, and this sharp, excited rhythm meant the person approaching the house was someone she trusted. Sixty seconds later came the knock. Kathy racked the barbell, sat up, and clicked off the clock radio. This new band, Pearl Jam. She’d been hearing their debut single everywhere that fall—thundering drums and raw vocals—and knew she’d have to buy the CD. She slid her wedding ring back on—she hadn’t wanted to scratch it on the weights—and wiped her hands on her college basketball shorts. She didn’t look at it again. The yellow Lab was already at the door, tail thumping the linoleum. “Who is it, girl?” Kathy hadn’t made time to get curtains for the kitchen. She’d only just transferred south after a brutal first year in Aroostook County. She thought she’d proven herself as a game warden, but everyone in her new district was treating her like a rookie. It wasn’t a mystery why: She was the first and only female in the history of the Maine Warden Service. Charley Stevens stood on the doorstep. Her new field training officer was a short, wiry man who reminded her at times of a coiled spring. He was a legend in the service for his woodcraft and bravery, and she was a little wary of him because he seemed kinder than his reputation suggested. Veteran wardens typically acted as if she were an intruder who’d climbed into their clubhouse through a broken window. “Hate to disturb you on your day off.” “Do I get days off during deer season?” “Ha. No.” He was a generation older than she was, but he talked and acted like a person who’d ridden a time machine from frontier days into the modern age. Charley wore a crisp green uniform over a white T-shirt that brought out the gray at his temples. Because it was November, he wore a blaze-orange hat and vest. The fluorescent color made him more visible in the woods—he all but glowed—and was worn by hunters and non-hunters alike as a safeguard against being mistaken for a deer. “You probably haven’t heard,” he said. “There’s a man been shot over in Wilton. Shot by a hunter.” His tone told her the man was dead. Sadie nosed through the door and leaned hard into Charley’s legs. He crouched to scratch her ears, neck, and haunches. The dog ascended into canine heaven. “Do you know either of the men?” Kathy asked. “Who says they’re men?” His wink told her this was lesson one: Never assume anything. “But yes, I know the shooter. Don Sands. Good man, good hunter. Hard to picture him making a mistake like this. The victim’s a feller named Douglas Ludwig. Trooper’s waiting on me, but I thought I’d swing here by first.” He ran a thumb thoughtfully along his jaw and added, “Figured I could use your help.” This was a white lie. The case should have been hers, he meant. She pushed the thought aside.Kathy became self-conscious of her sweaty body—of her pumped muscles and sandy hair barely contained by a band. Before the service would admit her, it had forced her to pass the same tests—weight lifting, swimming, running—as its male applicants. She was in the best shape of her life. But she’d never wanted to be mistaken for a man. “Give me five minutes.” “No rush,” he said, petting Sadie. “The thing about dead bodies is they don’t tend to wander off.” * * * The state trooper had parked his blue Chevrolet Caprice crosswise in the logging road to block oncoming traffic. But there was no traffic on this cold November morning, only a rotund woman who had ridden her bicycle to the scene. She was straddling a rusty Schwinn, holding the bike upright on legs as thick as fence posts, her breath coming in faint white puffs. Charley stopped his state-issued pickup, a green GMC, and the two wardens got out. “Did you call this in, Mandy?” he asked the woman. She was wearing a cap knitted to resemble a pumpkin—green stem included—and her sweater was also orange and handmade. Kathy remembered overhearing teens at the Blockbuster in Farmington laughing as she’d pedaled by once. Merchant, she recalled. Mandy Merchant. “Hey, Charley. Yeah, it was me. I don’t usually ride this way but thought I’d take a detour. I saw Mr. Sands first. He was heading toward Mr. Ludwig in the road, and I think I gave him a start coming up so quiet on my bike. I never seen a dead person before. They don’t look like in movies, do they? Mr. Sands shouted at me to call the police. I didn’t see no dog or nothing, just Mr. Ludwig there on the ground. I rode home to make the call and just got back. Four miles round trip!” “I see you biking everywhere, Mandy.” “And you always honk. I appreciate the encouragement.” Kathy was eager to examine the body and couldn’t understand why Charley was chatting with a woman who, in her mind, barely qualified as a witness. She’d noticed he had this way of talking to people—with a focused curiosity that never felt forced—as if their observations and opinions mattered more than anything to him at that moment. The trooper beckoned them over impatiently. “If you could keep the crowds back for us…” Kathy told the helpful cyclist. Mandy glanced over her shoulder at the empty road as if checking for the invisible crowd. Charley snorted in surprise. Her sense of humor always seemed to ambush people. Trooper Bixby slapped his wristwatch. “Took you long enough, Charley!” He was so tall and stiff-backed that Kathy thought ramrod was the perfect double entendre for a certain type of man. He wore his campaign hat tilted so far forward that his close-set eyes appeared to be peering out from under the brim like a suspicious animal. “This is a two-warden job,” Charley said. “Have you met Warden Frost?” “We—uh … I know who she is.” Bixby’s throat bobbed, a small tell. “So you’re good to go if I hand this over to you? I need to get back on the road. Due in court this afternoon.” “I wouldn’t mind getting your impressions first.” “My impressions?” Bixby blinked. “I drove up and saw Don standing over the body. He’d left his rifle over there and was waiting for me, and I could see he was torn up. He told me how he’d been hunting that tree line at dawn and how this fool came along the road all dressed in brown—like he wanted to be mistaken for a deer. It was obviously an accident. I understand you need to do a full investigation. I’m just giving you my two cents.” Bixby was overvaluing his opinion by a penny and a half, Kathy thought. Charley nodded and stroked the edge of his big chin. His eyes, which had held a touch of warmth at her doorstep, sharpened now with professional focus. “Warden Frost and I will be sure to keep you updated on every development in our inquiry.” Bixby muttered a confused thank-you, unsure how to receive an assurance he hadn’t requested. Mandy was still straddling her bike as he passed her in his Caprice, the tires kicking up pebbles and dust. She lifted a hand in a farewell wave; Bixby didn’t seem to notice. “How do you want to do this?” Kathy whispered in the silence that followed. “I examine the victim while you interview the shooter?” “Two heads are better than one,” Charley said. “Let’s have a look at Mr. Ludwig first.” Then he raised his voice and shouted across fifty feet of overgrown field to the stone wall where a slump-shouldered Don Sands awaited them. “We’ll be right with you, Don.” The dead man lay face down in the road, arms and legs akimbo, looking for all the world like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Nearby was a big splatter of blood where the bullet had exited his skull, taking pieces of bone, scalp, and brown hair with it. Douglas Ludwig had been a slim man with narrow shoulders and boyish hips. As Bixby had said, he was dressed in the colors of a whitetail deer: a brown Woolrich coat, gray flannel pants, and rubber-soled Bean boots. A crumpled white handkerchief lay on the ground beside him as if dropped in surrender. “What was he thinking?” Kathy wondered aloud. “Was he new to Maine? Did he not know it was deer season?” The two wardens wore blaze orange to be instantly identified as human beings by hunters whose adrenaline could override judgment. Even Mandy the cyclist was dressed almost entirely in a shade of the color. While fatal misidentifications were rare, walking in the woods in November without fluorescent clothing was reckless at best. Dressing in deer-brown was passively suicidal, she thought. Charley did a deep knee-bend over the corpse. He didn’t touch it but leaned very close to the gory exit wound. “Hmmm.” “What?” “He smells of pipe tobacco,” Charley murmured. “You don’t meet many pipe smokers nowadays—aside from the potheads.” Kathy couldn’t see the significance in the dead man’s habit. Was Charley suggesting it was evidentiary, or was this another inscrutable observation of his? Next, the older warden inspected the gravel around him, searching for something he seemed to expect. After a moment, he nodded once, satisfied, though Kathy couldn’t pick out anything of note in the disturbed rocks. “You said you didn’t know him personally,” she said. “What did you know?” “That he just moved here from New Hampshire. Lived alone. Drove a little white Volkswagen Beetle. Did clock and watch repair out of his home—although the sign on the door’s easy to miss. Folks around here mentioned he kept to himself. His property’s a quarter mile up the road, so he seems to have been walking from that direction. Can’t say I recall seeing him out for a stroll—morning, noon, or night.” In the truck, Charley had said Wilton wasn’t his stomping grounds, yet he knew more about its inhabitants than Bixby did, and the trooper patrolled these roads every day. Kathy realized his easy chatter with Mandy wasn’t small talk. It was how he collected information. He brushed his hands together as he straightened up. “We’ll want pictures of all this—and we’ll need to pace off some distances, too. Doubt we’ll find the bullet even if we can deduce the trajectory, but you never know. I’m guessing the trooper hasn’t radioed for the medical examiner. So we can do that now. Why don’t you get on the horn with the dispatcher while I ease into things with Don? I’ll wait until you’re off the radio before I ask him to tell his story.” He’s not going to exclude me from any of this. Kathy almost couldn’t believe it. Blaze Orange. Copyright © 2026 by Paul Doiron. All rights reserved. About “Blaze Orange” by Paul Doiron: When a local man is shot dead during deer season in 1990s Maine, all signs point to a heartbreaking mistake, as the victim was dressed head-to-toe in brown, and the shooter is a respected family man known for his gentleness. But as Charley and rookie warden Kathy Frost sift through the quiet tensions of a small community, two details refuse to add up. The victim knew better than to wear neutral colors during deer season. Why wasn’t he dressed in blaze orange? And something that should be at the scene simply isn’t. To solve the case, Charley must dig into old grudges and buried motives—and Kathy turns to the most unlikely investigator of all. 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