From Publishers Weekly
Bowen sustains interest in this follow-up to Coyote Wind despite the lack of a believable suspect, discernible clues or a precise sense of place. He relies on his unusual protagonist, Gabriel Du Pre, a laconic rancher, fiddle player and self-mocking, part Native American freethinker given to abstract utterances. Lured from his native Montana to perform in a Washington, D.C., music festival, Du Pre is fiddling when a young Indian woman dies, the first of several murders that occur in his trail. Each is committed with a primitive weapon; all are foretold by a shaman; in the vicinity, each time, is psychotic rich man and artistic hanger-on, Paul Chase. Yet all Du Pre can do is wait for the shaman's next warning and follow his best hunches: that the killer's motive is pleasure, that Chase is being used for cover and that Du Pre is the killer's real focus. It's often hard to locate Du Pre as he is seen, variously, navigating a Canadian river, drinking with his lover Madelaine and playing with his grandchildren. But Bowen's prose is often droll and his characters well-etched; only clue seekers are in for a lean time here.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This is the second outing for one of the most unusual characters working the fictional homicide beat. Gabriel Du Pre{}, a Me{}tis Indian, is a Montana cattle inspector, a sometime sheriff's deputy, and a champion fiddler who is occasionally involved in a murder investigation. Du Pre{} opens this novel reluctantly appearing at a folk festival on the Mall in Washington D.C.; the festival is disrupted by the murder of a young Cree woman. Several more young Native Americans are killed, all in situations implicating Paul Chase, a nasty but cowardly anthropologist. The mystery takes a backseat to the strong character development and nearly palpable sense of place Bowen creates. His best characters include Benetsee, an ageless drunk who seems to know everything, past and future; Madelaine, Du Pre{}'s high-spirited lover; Maria, his studious but pragmatic daughter; and Montana itself, which is animated through powerfully poetic but unsentimental descriptions. Bowen's use of the speech patterns of the Me{}tis, a people descended from Cree, Chippewa, and French exiles of Upper Canada, takes some getting used to, but the rewards are great. George Needham
Review
“Bowen’s prose is often droll and his characters well-etched.” —Publishers Weekly “One of the most unusual characters working the fictional homicide beat . . . powerfully poetic but unsentimental.” —Booklist “The best of Tony Hillerman meets Zane Grey . . . Du Pré is a character of legendary proportions.” —Ridley Pearson, author of The Angel Maker and No Witness
About the Author
Peter Bowen (b. 1945) is an author best known for mystery novels set in the modern American West. When he was ten, Bowen’s family moved to Bozeman, Montana, where a paper route introduced him to the grizzled old cowboys who frequented a bar called The Oaks. Listening to their stories, some of which stretched back to the 1870s, Bowen found inspiration for his later fiction. Following time at the University of Michigan and the University of Montana, Bowen published his first novel, Yellowstone Kelly, in 1987. After two more novels featuring the real-life Western hero, Bowen published Coyote Wind (1994), which introduced Gabriel Du Pré, a mixed-race lawman living in fictional Toussaint, Montana. Bowen has written thirteen novels in the series, in which Du Pré gets tangled up in everything from cold-blooded murder to the hunt for rare fossils. Bowen continues to live and write in Livingston, Montana.
