The first three novels in a contemporary western mystery series featuring a half-Indian cattle inspector and “character of legendary proportions” (Ridley Pearson).
Officially, Gabriel Du Pré is the cattle inspector for Toussaint, Montana, responsible for making sure no one tries to sell cattle branded by another ranch. Unofficially, he is responsible for much more than cows’ backsides. The barren country around Toussaint is too vast for the town’s small police force, and so, when needed, this hard-nosed Métis Indian lends a hand. In Gabriel Du Pré “Bowen has taken the antihero of Hemingway and Hammett and brought him up to date . . . a fresh, memorable character” (The New York Times Book Review).
Coyote Wind: Newly discovered plane wreckage in the desert leads Du Pré to a hidden crime stretching back a generation.
“Gabe’s rhythmic, regional voice and his sly wit take the novel to another level.” —Booklist
Specimen Song: In Washington, DC, to play his fiddle for a Smithsonian festival, Du Pré pursues a serial killer who’s targeting Native Americans.
A “plain-spoken, deep-thinking Montana cattle inspector” takes on a serial killer in DC. —The New York Times Book Review
“Bowen’s prose is often droll and his characters well-etched.” —Publishers Weekly
Wolf, No Wolf: When two activists agitating for the reintroduction of wolves into Montana’s high plains are murdered, Du Pré finds himself caught in the cross fire between ranchers, environmentalists, and FBI agents.
“Fiddler, father, widower, cowboy and lover, Du Pré has the soul of a poet, the eye of a wise man, and the heart of a comic.” —The New York Times Book Review
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 fourteen 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.