Badlands: A Montana Mystery Featuring Gabriel Du Pre - Hardcover

Bowen, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312262523 ISBN 13: 9780312262525

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2003

Synopsis

A secretive millennial cult from California purchases a ranch on the outskirts of the Montana badlands---the eerily silent, dry, and windy dead zone---and the Toussaint townsfolk are none too pleased.

The cult members keep to themselves, but the suspicious circumstances under which they’ve arrived have Gabriel Du Pré questioning their motives and seeking answers. He soon learns from a friend in the FBI that seven of the cult’s recently defected members were killed---each shot to death---but no arrests have been made. Then another shooting occurs at the perimeter of the ranch, and Du Pré finds himself blindly searching for a killer, an explanation for the murders, and the identity of the cult’s elusive leader.

With Badlands, his tenth novel in this acclaimed series, Peter Bowen has written his most timely and chilling novel to date: a story of faceless terror told in lyrical prose and steeped in the Métis tradition of storytelling.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Bowen, a Montanan, writes of the West. Cowboy, hunting and fishing guide, folksinger, poet, essayist, and novelist, he’s written the picaresque Yellowstone Kelly historical novels, humor columns, and essays on blood sport as Coyote Jack. He has also written the Gabriel Du Pré mysteries, in part, because “the Métis are a great people, a wonderful people, and not many Americans know anything about them.”

From the Back Cover

Praise for the Gabriel Du Pré Mysteries

Ash Child
“Bowen’s stories are always well constructed and very intelligent. . . . Like so many outstanding but wildly different crime series, from James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels to Steven Havill’s Bill Gastner series, the Du Pré stories are about a vanishing way of life and the determined souls who fight a rearguard action to keep it alive. . . . [A] dazzling entry in a wonderful series.”---Booklist (starred review)

“Peter Bowen does for Montana what Tony Hillerman does for New Mexico. . . . picturesque, totally absorbing, and utterly charming . . . Anyone who has not read a Gabriel Du Pré mystery is missing out on something special.”---Midwest Book Review

Cruzatte and Maria
“A fine introduction both to Bowen’s work and to another Montana---that is, the real state behind the charmingly rustic dude ranch and country living fantasy . . . imaginative.”---Ben Kaufmann, San Jose Mercury News

The Stick Game
“Bowen’s rock-hewn hero is a solid man with lusty appetites who loves red meat, liquor, and tobacco, plays a smoking fiddle, and is faithful to his woman. But a shrewd mind and wry sense of humor assert themselves eloquently in an austere tribal idiom that eschews such fluff as prepositions and rarely departs from the present tense of language---and of life.”---Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

Long Son
“Peter Bowen writes about the rural West better than just about anyone . . . gets it right over and over again.”---Rocky Mountain News

Reviews

Gabriel Du Pre, Bowen's hard-drinking, fast-driving, fiddle-playing western hero, investigates the activities of a sinister religious cult that purchases a huge cattle ranch in the 10th entry in this gripping and humorous series (after 2002's Ash Child). Du Pre's suspicions are aroused when the Host of Yahweh immediately destroys the ranch buildings, sells the livestock and erects a makeshift metal chapel for secret rites. Soon, reports of mass murders and suicides bring in cautious FBI agents ever mindful of the Waco debacle. Du Pre's blunt speech and sometimes opaque thought patterns can be hard to follow, but his pursuits of wrongdoers over cliffs, canyons and arid river beds are truly riveting. His encounters with Benetsee, a native seer and medicine man, are often comical, though the old man provides good counsel when the self-appointed sleuth, with a posse of deputies and federal agents, surround the compound for the final siege. Other denizens of remote Toussaint, Mont., including Du Pre's girlfriend, tough-minded bartender Madelaine, and his wayward granddaughter, Pallas, provide welcome diversions from the ominous goings-on behind the Host's electric fence. A buffalo stampede, tales of Indian lore and even the modern menace of biological weaponry lead to a just-in-the-nick-of-time finale.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The residents in and around rural Toussaint, Montana, are a contentious group, but when the sun sets, they are all related by their shared reverence for the land and the mountains that define their lives. When the Eide family sells the ranch it owned since 1882, there's genuine sadness among the neighbors. Soon sadness is replaced by anxiety. The new neighbors are the Host of Yahweh, a millennial cult. Gabe Du Pre, half-breed Metis Indian, expert fiddler, part-time brand inspector, and occasional deputy, has his doubts about the newcomers, too--doubts that are magnified when the FBI connects seven murders with recent defectors from the cult. The Feds and Gabe work together to make the case against the cult. Du Pre may well be the most unusual character in mystery fiction. He's illiterate, smokes too much, is never without his flask, gets pulled over when he's not driving 30 miles over the limit (local cops worry he's sick), and is by far the sharpest knife in the drawer. Author Bowen is also an accomplished poet and folksinger. It shows. His Montana mysteries flow with sublime musical dialogue. A fine series that deserves a larger following. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312262523
• ISBN 13: 9780312262525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272