This image is the cover for the book Coyote Wind, The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré

Coyote Wind, The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré

First in the crime-fiction series set in the modern-day west, starring a half-French, half-Indian “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 livestock 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. When the sheriff offers gas money to investigate newly discovered plane wreckage in the desert, Du Pré quickly finds himself embroiled in a mystery stretching back a generation.

For three decades, the crashed plane sat in the sun as the bodies inside rotted away to their bones. Two skeletons are whole, but for one nothing remains but the hands, the skull, and the bullet that ended his life. The crime was hidden long ago, but in the Montana badlands, nothing stays buried forever . . .

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 is the 1st book in The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré series, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Peter Bowen

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.