While working on the set of a controversial documentary, Du Pré gets entangled in two struggles—one with a murderer, and another with the US government When asked to serve as a consultant for a documentary about the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's expedition up the Missouri River, Gabriel Du Pré's impulse is to flee. Eastern Montana isn't accustomed to getting much attention, and its residents prefer it that way. But the director of the film is dating Du Pré's daughter, so this hard-bitten fiddler's hands are tied.   Du Pré agrees to help the filmmakers navigate the river, which is as deadly now as it was in 1805. The Missouri has claimed nine lives in the past three years—a suspiciously high death toll that the FBI wants Du Pré to investigate. While trolling the riverbanks, Du Pré stumbles upon a national treasure: Meriwether Lewis's lost journals, which the American government will do anything to get back. Meanwhile, when members of the film crew start dying, Du...

When a bullying billionaire comes after Du Pré, the part-time investigator will stop at nothing to protect what's his A rumor circulates around academic circles that the long-lost journals of Lewis and Clark are in the possession of hard-bitten Montana fiddler Gabriel Du Pré. A few years ago, Du Pré led a documentary film crew down the Missouri River to commemorate the bicentennial of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, but he won't say whether or not he has the journals. Only Benetsee, Du Pré's mysterious spiritual guide, has any idea where the journals are, and only a fool would try to make Benetsee talk when he doesn't feel like it.   It's quite possible, though, that billionaire Markham Millbank is a fool. His money cannot persuade Du Pré, and so he begins to consider other forms of pressure. When two of Du Pré's friends are kidnapped, the fiddler faces a tough decision: hand over the journal or risk their lives to keep it out of the wrong hands.

An earthquake shakes Montana, unearthing old bones and new trouble Usually it takes more than one beer to make the Toussaint bar shake. When the earthquake hits, part-time deputy Gabriel Du Pré and his friends are lamenting the fishing resort a Japanese firm has planned for their small town. The floor shakes, the lights go out, and glass rains from the walls. When they emerge from the bar, they see a new landscape. Roads are mangled, mountains have shifted, and the spring where the Japanese businessmen had planned to build their resort is no more. In its place is an uprooted Indian burial ground, and a massive headache for Du Pré.   As local Native American tribes fight over the ancient remains, a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth is found in the hands of a murdered anthropologist. Du Pré had just wanted a beer. Instead he found a murder that was sixty-five million years in the making.

A murder investigation leads Du Pré into the cutthroat world of illegal horse racing Gabriel Du Pré's aunt Pauline has burned through more than her share of husbands, so it's no surprise when she shows up in Toussaint complaining that the latest one, Badger, has run off. Du Pré, the fiddler and sometimes deputy, agrees to go looking for her man and finds him shot, execution-style, in the wilds of the Montana countryside. A chat with his contacts at the FBI reveals that Badger, a small-time drug smuggler, had been working for them since his last arrest. Pauline's husband was bait, but the big fish got away.   The last lead was to a cabal of wealthy gamblers who pass their time racing horses in the barren Montana brush. To infiltrate their tight-knit syndicate, Du Pré goes undercover, lining up his own horse and jockey. He must tread lightly—horses are not the only things these men shoot.

Du Pré investigates a gold mining company whose pollution might be poisoning the children of a nearby reservation Something is rotten in the Fort Belknap Reservation. Life has always been tough on this barren stretch just south of the Canadian border, but now the children are dying. While playing his fiddle in a reservation bar, part-time deputy Gabriel Du Pré meets an accordionist who suspects that the children's health defects and low test scores are connected to the nearby Persephone mine.   Meanwhile, Du Pré investigates the disappearance of one of the afflicted children. When the boy turns up dead, the accordionist's theory gains credence. It wouldn't be the first time that the rich men of Montana found wealth at the expense of the reservation's children.

When he inherits his parents' ranch, a notorious former resident of Toussaint comes home to make trouble for Du Pré For four generations, the Messmers have raised cattle in the rough country of eastern Montana. When the current owners die in a motor home accident, they leave the ranch to their son—an ominous development for everyone in the area, both human and bovine. Larry Messmer left Toussaint in the 1980s, when he got in trouble for bludgeoning a horse to death, and Gabriel Du Pré hoped he would never come back. Larry announces his return by having his ranch hands kill every weak cow on the property. Unfortunately, they will not be the last to die.   The FBI asks Du Pré, a cattle inspector and occasional lawman, to keep an eye on Larry. What he finds is a ranch stricken by criminal greed, and lorded over by a prodigal son who should never have come home.

A serial killer is stalking the high plains of Montana, and Du Pré just might be the only man who can stop him Gabriel Du Pré does not want to read the newspaper article. A fifth body has been found—another girl raped, tortured, and left in the Montana wasteland to be devoured by coyotes—and opening the paper will draw him into the hunt for her killer. But Du Pré, the cattle inspector and occasional deputy, has already been drafted. Minutes later, the local sheriff calls, asking for help at a crime scene. Another girl is found dead, this time in Du Pré's backyard.   Not far from the body, he finds two more murdered women lain over each other in a grisly cross. If this is a clue, it tells him nothing. As more girls die, and a young woman he cares about disappears, Du Pré fights to comprehend the murderer. To find this monster, he must learn to think like him and give in to the part of himself that knows how to kill.

A decades-old plane crash leads Du Pré to possible murder, and to a landowner with dark secrets Officially, Gabriel Du Pré is the cattle inspector for Toussaint, Montana, responsible for making sure that 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 hybrid of Indian and Frenchman 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 has 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, skull, and the bullet that ended his life. The crime was hidden long ago, but in the Montana badlands, nothing stays buried forever.

A serial killer follows Du Pré from Washington, DC, back to Montana A lost and frightened horse plods down the National Mall, startling the crowd. When Gabriel Du Pré spots the confused animal, the connection is immediate, for neither of these creatures belongs in the sweltering heat of a DC summer. Du Pré, a Métis Indian from the wilds of Montana, calms the horse and leads it to the nearest policeman. Du Pré is in Washington to play his people's music for a Smithsonian festival, but after leading the horse to safety, he encounters a murder instead.   The dead woman is Cree Indian, come down from Canada to sing in the festival. Du Pré tries to put her death out of his mind and returns to Montana, but more killings follow: each time with a primitive weapon, each time foretold by a local shaman. As the body count rises and the killer closes on Du Pré, the lawman vows to never again make the mistake of leaving Montana.

The beginning of the legend of Yellowstone Kelly, one of the Old West’s most out-sized personalitiesLuther “Yellowstone” Kelly had one of the longest, strangest, and most breathtaking careers in the Old West. The intrepid scout’s talent for being in the right place at an exciting time would take him all over the world, from the Great Plains to Africa to the Philippines. Throughout his adventures, Kelly maintained a stoic outlook, a fierce wit, and a talent for survival that got him out of more than a few dangerous scrapes.Yellowstone Kelly: Gentleman and Scout, the first novel in Peter Bowen’s fast-paced series, finds Kelly hunting wolves with the Nez Percé while trying actively to avoid contact with just about everyone else. This plan quickly falls apart, and Kelly is hired by a group of Englishmen who need a guide for a buffalo hunt. Kelly soon finds himself swept further from home than he ever has been before, going from the Indian Wars to the Zulu Wars.ReviewPraise for the Yellowstone Kelly series:“Very, very funny.” —Publishers Weekly“The Old West is a wonderfully wild place in Bowen’s hands.” —Kirkus Reviews“[The Yellowstone Kelly series] features an endearing, slightly mysterious protagonist who always has one more unexplored trait, unparalleled dialogue that hints at ethnic or regional inflections, and a very sly sense of humor.” —BooklistAbout the AuthorPeter 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 a few 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.

In the latest installment of Peter Bowen's acclaimed mystery series, Gabriel Du Pré investigates a century-old crimeLieutenant John Patchen has come to Montana to persuade Chappie Plaquemines, his former gunnery sergeant in Iraq and the son of Gabriel Du Pré's girlfriend, to accept the Navy Cross. First, however, Du Pré and Patchen must find the wounded marine, who was last seen drinking heavily in the Toussaint Saloon. They locate 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 who were last seen fleeing from General 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...

A storm is brewing in Toussaint between the ranchers and environmentalists, and it's up to Du Pré to stop the bloodshed Two men have been cutting fences at the ranches of Toussaint, Montana, loosing thousands of dollars of cattle to use as target practice for their .22 rifles. Are they thieves? Pranksters? Local cattle inspector Gabriel Du Pré guesses they're environmentalists agitating for the reintroduction of native wolves to Montana's high plains. Du Pré knows that the environmentalists are trying to send a message to the ranchers of eastern Montana. He also has a hunch that they are already dead.   When the activists are found shot to death, Du Pré attempts to contain the chaos. The FBI descends, but their agents are as clueless in this territory as the hapless environmentalists. One of Toussaint's citizens committed this crime, killing to protect the traditional way of ranching life, a loyalty that Du Pré shares. If anyone's going to arrest his people, it will be the...

When a mysterious cult moves in on the outskirts of Toussaint, it’s up to Du Pré to investigate whether the members are merely eccentric—or murderous The Eides have owned cattle in Montana since 1882, but a few days after they pull up stakes and sell their property, their homestead goes up in flames. When Gabriel Du Pré arrives on scene, nothing is left but the ashes. A serene young man appears, insisting that the fires were set purposefully and firmly asking Du Pré to leave. He is a representative from the Host of Yahweh, the millennial cult that has purchased the sprawling ranch on the edge of the Badlands, and arson is just the beginning of their suspicious behavior.At first the people of Toussaint try to ignore the secretive cult. But when Du Pré gets a tip from an FBI contact that seven Host of Yahweh defectors were recently shot to death, he takes another look at the glassy-eyed conclave. Behind their peaceful smiles, great evil lurks.