Game Warden Mike Bowditch is not on duty. He is at a party. His engagement party. He is not on duty. He is not on duty. Yes,  there’s someone jet-skiing at night and that’s illegal and every bone in his body wants to find some boat to commandeer so he can go read the merry miscreant the riot act, but he’s not on duty. His fiance he’s at the party with is very firm about this subject.  But THAT sudden  noise was definitely the sound of a boat propeller hitting a human body.    Now he’s on duty.   Dead Man’s Wake is a mystery set around a pond in Maine, where a man has been killed and lost an arm to a propeller. Upon investigation, Mitch and others discover that the man was a wealthy cheat: he had evidently been entertaining a very young lady at his wife’s private island, where they’d both gotten sloppy drunk and ‘drowned’. Why those quotation marks, you ask? Well, it wouldn’t be much of a mystery if the man’s death was that easy, would it? There’s skulduggery afoot! One interesting element of this book is the presence of a harbor cop who keeps ping-ponging from some gung-ho eager beaver to suspicious and sulky throughout the book, like he has two personalities. Mike’s mentor Charley and his daughter Stacey, a wildlife biologists, have prominent parts and there’s a fair bit of plane action, too. I enjoyed this well enough, especially the evolving Mike-Stacey relationship, but it’s telling that I stopped reading it for a week to read several other things, instead.