This image is the cover for the book Bitter Creek, The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré

Bitter Creek, The Montana Mysteries Featuring Gabriel Du Pré

“Bitter Creek is likely the top of the Du Pré series . . . Lively and absolutely fascinating” (Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall).

Lt. John Patchen has come to Montana to persuade Chappie Plaquemines, his former gunnery sergeant in Iraq, to accept the Navy Cross. First, however, Patchen must find the wounded marine, who was last seen drinking heavily in the Toussaint Saloon. With the help of Gabriel Du Pré, who’s romantically involved with Chappie’s mother, he locates him soon enough, disheveled and stinking of stale booze. But a sobering visit to a medicine man’s sweat lodge reveals a much greater mystery: The unsolved case of a band of Métis Indians who were last seen fleeing from Gen. Black Jack Pershing’s troops in 1910, before disappearing.

Strange voices within the sweat lodge speak of a place called Bitter Creek, where the Métis encountered their fate. To find it, Du Pré tracks down the only living survivor of the massacre, a feisty old woman whose memories may not be as trustworthy as they seem. But when Amalie leads Du Pré to Pardoe, an out-of-the-way crossroads north of Helena, he senses they’re about to uncover long-buried secrets. Discouraged by the US military with their lives threatened by locals whose ancestors may have played a role in the murders, Chappie, Patchen, and Du Pré bravely pursue the truth so the victims of a terrible injustice might finally rest in peace.

Bitter Creek is the 14th 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.

Open Road Integrated Media