‘Murder in the Maple Woods’: Murder-mystery crime novel in Maine [Video]

PORTLAND, Maine — If you enjoy crime novels set in Maine, you’ve got plenty to choose from. There are stories set on the coast, in cities and suburbs and small towns, on islands and lakes and rivers and mountains and—you get the idea.

Claire Ackroyd wanted to do something different. A landscape designer and organic inspector, she was looking to write her first novel and knew exactly where she wanted to set the story: in the sugar camps that produce much of the state’s maple syrup. The area was familiar to her from her work certifying which maple syrups were organically produced.

The events in her novel, “Murder in the Maple Woods,” unfold in the region south of the Maine-Quebec border from roughly Jackman to Millinocket. 

“It’s such an interesting place,” Ackroyd said. “I was …